Current issue/email notification settings in connection with back issue publication

We have a rather specific problem that occurs in connection with back issue publication in one of our journals. The situation is as follows: new issues keep getting added, but the journal management retroactively publishes back issues as well. As far as we were able to find out, the issue published most recently automatically becomes the current issue in OJS, which we can then change manually. While this is somewhat of a hassle that we would love to avoid, the main problem lies in the email notifications this probably creates for registered readers. This leads us to two questions:

  1. Is it possible to turn off flagging the most recent issue as the current issue altogether, so we can manually set the current issue only where applicable and only after publication (i.e. not automatically on publication)?

  2. Is it possible to edit, turn, off, specifiy conditions for or even see the email notification readers get when a new issue is published (we were not able to discover any settings or notifications related to that anyhwere; prepared emails does not seem to include these)?

We have not had a look at the code since making changes there is beyond our abilities, so we sincerely hope there is something we can do from the administration/journal manager side of things. We are using OJS 2.4.4.1 and have not been able to find information on this problem here or anywhere else - apologies if we overlooked something and many thanks in advance.

2 Likes

Hi @ojs_univie,

To change the behavior of both aspects of OJS, you’ll need to modify pages/editor/IssueManagementHandler.inc.php in the publishIssue function. These are small modifications, but will require a little bit of PHP experience.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thank you very much! We’ll try and see if we can figure that out.

Hi @ojs_univie, did you have any success with this? I’m researching a similar solution, this time with OJS 2.4.6.

@asmecher, re: changing the publishIssue() function, if there are multiple journals, I’m assuming I should be able to add an if/else based on the Journal’s ID value to avoid the email notifications? I wouldn’t want to turn off notifications for all journals (at this point anyway).

Cheers,

Graham

Hi @gfaulkner,

Yes, an approach like that should work.

FYI, the latest OJS 3.x has a checkbox that allows you to enable/disable the notifications when publishing an issue.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thanks @asmecher – I’ll give it a try. And point taken about moving to 3.x! I moved one of our journals to 3.1.1 and they love it.

Graham

Hi @gfaulkner, we never got around to trying @asmecher’s suggestions so we cannot add anything unfortunately.

Hi all,

I did a simple if/else as discussed (using the journal’s id), and turned off the notifications for the journal. Thanks @asmecher - works as advertised.

Graham