Reviewing the closed github issues today, I see that I made a similar request in 2018:
I think that all this “certificates” (reviewers, attendance at conferences, authorship of a book…) is a very bureaucratic thing typical of latin countries (and their accreditation processes) so possibly it is not full understood in other cultures.
I try to answer your questions Nate, but in case of contradiction or error I hope that @fellipe.gestio corrects me because this is his FR:
When should a reviewer be entitled to a certificate? When do you submit a review? When does an editor confirm a review? Or when an editor thanks the reviewer? (I suspect there are a lot of reviews submitted that are incomplete or the editor just says “I can’t do that.”)
In the third case: “when an editor thanks the reviewer”… as far as it means the editor agrees with the review work done.
Are the signatures, as shown in your examples, an important part of the certificate?
I do not think so. The “rubric” (as “graphical signature”) has no legal validity and is only aesthetic, so I assume that if the journal wants to digitally sign the generated PDFs, it should do so later.
While asking OJS to digitally sign the PDFs seems to me to complicate the project greatly and goes beyond the scope of the OJS’s features, I believe that the digital signature should be done by the journal afterwards with third-party tools.
This is why I would suggest using a model PDF template (in which, if the journal wishes, it can attach the rubric, the journal’s logo, etc.) to which add the relevant fields (reviewer name/surname, review date, article to review…).
The plugin could be a form with the date-range (and the reviewer’s name) for a batch generating process.
One of the example certificates is for a published article - presumably reviewers should get credit for reviews of rejected articles?
Exactly. Certifications are for reviewers to accredit state agencies that have done review work. This work is recognized regardless of the outcome of the review…as long as the review was done correctly.