Batch email of Decision to Authors

I would like to know how to add options to the Notifications section. Specifically I need to have an option which permits Directors to make their decisions, then when ready, notify all authors of the decision at the same time. Where in the code base would be a good place to start making the appropriate modification.

However, I’m hopeful that others have the same requirement and solved this problem already! Any guidance is appreciated.

Paul

Hi @Paul_Coyne,

In OJS 2.x, only the submitting author has access to the submission, so while you could fairly quickly modify the system to include other authors in the recipient list of the decision email, they wouldn’t be able to log into the system and see the submission’s progress there.

Note that this has already been resolved for OJS 3.0, which will be released next year.

If you have some PHP/HTML experience, I can suggest where to start.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi Alex,

Many thanks for the reply. However, I can see on reflection that I did a
pretty poor job of articulating the problem I am looking to solve.

I’m actually working on the OCS system in support of a large’ish conference
(1700 submissions) which will result in about 500 accepted posters and
papers. The idea is to be able to use the notifications module to notifiy
all Accepted paper with a decision letter - at the same time. Similarly for
rejected papers. In my workflow Track Directors make decisions but only
after a final meeting of all track directors will we know the precise
numbers that will be accepted as space is limited. After this meeting we
will proceed to contact people with decisions about their submissions.

Not really sure where to start so any guidance is appreciated.

Best
Paul

Hi @Paul_Coyne,

Hmm, so you’ll be notifying authors en masse? OCS unfortunately doesn’t have anything built in for that. Your closest bet will likely be to use the papers report plugin, which includes the most recent director decision; import that into a spreadsheet, look at the rows that record an Accept or Reject decision (depending what you want to send), and do a mail merge from your spreadsheet.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team