Blind copies of article

Publishing Practices
1

hi. we would like authors to submit a ‘blind copy’ of their article which includes no reference to the identity of the author(s)) that can be sent to reviewers, in addition to the full article.

Is there a facility to do this in OJS? - we are using version 3

for now I have added it as an extra component ‘blind article’ but this feels a little clunky

this is the practice that we’ve been using with the journal that we are moving to OJs
thanks

2

Hi @ruth ,

The idea is that the pure article text contains no personal info. So actually no need to submit two article texts, one with the personal info and the other blind, but only the blind one. The author names and other info is available in the metadata, so no need to duplicate them in the article text. The layout editor that produces end PDFs can combine the pure article text and the personal info in the final PDFs then.

Regards, Primož

3

Hi @ruth
I also request a full manuscript besides a blinded manuscript during submission. Since the metadata contains only abstracts, the section or layout editor can insert esp. the institute name or other blinded areas by using full manuscript. Yes, I also generated “document” type new article component called full manuscript and configured it as “supplementary file” to prevent it from taking the place of the blinded manuscript file. My journals curerntly use OJS 3.2.1.3
Note: I suggest to apply the opposite, and configure the blinded manuscript as the primary submission component.
Regards,

4

hi primozs, thanks for your reply. The problem is that there may well be references to the authors own work in the body of the paper, so we ask authors to prepare an anonymised version.

5

hi ugur, thanks for your reply and useful suggestion which i’ll follow.

6

Not sure if bumping an old topic is the best approach here, but an editor recently pointed out a Python script they use for this purpose.

That had me wondering what everyone’s best practices surrounding anonymization of submissions/reviews/etc. is. Have any automatic solutions through, say, a plugin been developed lately?