Author bio not automatically copied to submission metadata ...?

Software Support
1

This is about OJS3 and a problem we encountered preparing the new issue of www.jrfm.eu .

When authors are submitting articles, the authors bio is not automatically copied to the submission metadata, even though the persons have registered and have thoroughly filled in a bio statement. At least not in all cases; in some of them it seemes to work.

I am pretty sure I am overlooking something obvious … but what?

I would be grateful for any hint -
greetings, CW

2

Hi @Jesaiah,

There are two concepts here:

  • User records; users log in and interact with OJS. Users can e.g. log in and change personal details like affiliations, biographies, etc.
  • Author records; these are part of the scholarly record. Each author record is attached to a specific article.

If the same person authors two separate articles, then they’ll have a single user account, but two author records. Changing the user account’s biography will not change the author records; those will need to be changed by altering the submission’s metadata. This is intentional – consider e.g. an author who changes last name or institution; that change shouldn’t be reflected in already-published content.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Tea

3

First of all THANKS for this real fast reply.

I get the point.
Yet it would be a nice option to have a button “copy bio to metadata” at least for editors, because the process is sort of complicated: Open user profile → copy bio data → go to submissions → search submission record → open metadata → open user / edit → paste bio to author profile → Save → close.

I dream about a button in the “submitted article” section, tab production, which goes only active if the “Author Bio” field in the article metadata is empty and copies the author bio data from the profile to the article author metadata.

This would make our production process much easier and would not contradict your concerns. The data remains bound to the article; the author may change his/her bio afterwards, stay up to date himself and yet the authors bio data connected to the article stays the same.

I am not sure if I am clear enough, I sometimes lack the correct expressions…

What do you think?

1 Like
4

Hi @Jesaiah,

Hmm, have you worked with ORCIDs? Another option might be to not include author bios in the article metadata, but instead link to the author’s ORCID page, which could be updated in a single place (and is much more comprehensive).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

5

Hi Alec,

I am trying to use ORCIDs for this reason, however, it seems clear the ORCID api and OJS do not talk to each other. I am stuck between two forums where both the ORCID API community forum says the problem is with OJS and OJS says the problem is with ORCID! And yes, I have checked the settings (and checked these with the ORCID API group) and I have the most up to date plugin and the most up to date OJS and it is still not working.

https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/6344

I agree with Jesaiah that having the option to copy user metadata to the contributor details would be useful and would save time.

Thanks
Jacqueline