We are using 3.2.1.1. Recently one of the journal managers reported a problem with finding/assigning a particular reviewer. Here is what happens. When I search for the reviewer in the Add Reviewer screen (Locate a Reviewer search field), his name does not appear. If I click on “Enroll an Existing User” at the bottom of the Add Reviewer Screen instead and then type his name or email in the Search by Name field, again his name doesn’t appear in the list. However, if I go to Users & Roles and search for the same reviewer the search is successful. If I click on ‘Edit User’ I can see that the user roles – Author Reviewer, and Reader are selected for him. It appears that the search function in the Add Reviewer screen is not seeing this particular reviewer. I checked and the user is not involved in any other capacity/role in the editorial workflow for this submission. The find/assign function works fine for other reviewers.
This is a simple error (more exactly - multiple errors) of OJS 3.2.x. In our case we experienced the same problem by upgrading from OJS 3.1.2 to 3.2.1.
Now it is required that for reviewers there should be a record in user_settings with setting_name = “affiliation”. If not such record - a reviewer is not shown in the selection list. N.B. - the record may be empty.
Error 1: Despite “Affiliation” is required to register as a new user, furthermore, it is not an obligatory field, if a user edits its profile.
Error 2: If a user edits own profile, “Affiliation” may be empty and no setting is inserted into user_settings table. In a Journal Manager edits user data, an empty record is inserted into user_settings table.
Error 3: In older versions, “Affiliation” could be empty - but it is now obligatory. During the DB conversion, in such cases no empty records are inserted for “Affilation”.
I fixed this bug by inserting the missing empty records using the following script:
insert into user_settings(user_id, locale, setting_name, assoc_id, setting_value, setting_type, assoc_type)
select distinct(user_id), “en_US”, “affiliation”, 0, “”, “string”, 0 from user_settings where user_id not in (select user_id from user_settings where setting_name=“affiliation”);