Under Users&Roles settings there is a listing of existing user roles within the context.
Besides showing the names of the roles the listing shows the four stages of the workflow and corresponding checkboxes which visualize the stages where the given role can gain access.
Or, that is what you would think.
However, although for example the role “production editor” has checkboxes on Copyediting and Production by default, those checkboxes do not mean really anything. A Production Editor can access a review stage of any submission. A Production Editor can even send a submission from the submissions stage to the review stage without being assigned to the submission although, by common sense, she should not have even access to either.
This all is extremely misleading for the editors. When the assign that role to someone, they expect that the checkboxes there actually matter.
What really counts here is the Permission level and the system does not show that at all in the listing. You have to know it is there or start to edit the role to show the pull down menu where it is mentioned.
The suggestions:
- The role listing should show the permission level of each role and maybe even explain somewhere on the page what it means
- The checboxes should actually affect also the journal manager level users OR they should be removed altogether from the journal manager level user roles.