Author email mandatory or not?

Software Support
1

Hello,

I have a question concerning the native import/export plugin.

If I get it well, according to the DTD, the author’s email field is supposed to be set:

ELEMENT author (firstname, middlename?, lastname, affiliation*, country?, email, url?, competing_interests*, biography*)

But when reading the import class in the plugin, this is the only check I see about the email of the author (not meaning mandatory):

if (($node = $authorNode->getChildByName(‘email’))) $author->setEmail((string)$node->getValue());

Do I have to provide the author’s email, or OJS will get angry later?

Thank you.

2

We have tried the import without author emails (because that data is not available for older journals) in earlier versions of OJS (2.4.6), but there were error messages, coming from the database, if I remember correctly.

Also, if you will ever edit an imported article’s metadata, the edit form will keep showing an error when trying to save your edit until you enter an email address.

So - without diving too deep into detail of the OJS source code, we decided it was better in a long term perspective, to insert dummy mail addresses in the import XML rather than worry about an inconsistent database later on, for example when upgrading to another version.

1 Like
3

Ok thank you for the answer.