Customizing workflow for items with submission checklist exceptions

Does anyone have experience with customizing OJS or their workflow to handle exceptions to the points set out in the author submission checklist?

We are preparing to implement Creative Commons licensing for one of our journals and the editors have selected the license that will serve as the journal default, i.e. will be in the Copyright Notice section for both the About page and the submission checklist. We don’t anticipate many authors having a problem with the default license, but we want authors to be able to use other licenses when they have a need.

My first idea is to customize the submission checklist so that the authors have an either/or choice when it comes to the Copyright Notice. Either they can simply select the default license or they can check a box that says that they’re working with the editors to set up an alternative. Something like that. The out-of-the-box functionality doesn’t appear to allow for this. Does anyone have an idea of whether this would be possible with some code customization and how difficult that customization might be?

My second idea is to use Quick Submit to bypass the submission checklist, but then the author won’t have access to the workflow. Authorizing users other than editors and submitters to access the workflow for an item isn’t possible until OJS 3.0, correct? We’re getting ready to upgrade to 2.4.8-1.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

TIA,
Ingrid

Hi @Ingrid,

You’re correct that this isn’t available out-of-the-box – but this modification is certainly possible, and roughly follows some modifications others have done to add other informational metadata fields to the submission process. Have a look at this (old) thread for some details. I wouldn’t suggest depending on the QuickSubmit plugin for this, as you’ll be losing almost all of the system’s workflow tools.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team