Discussion with author sent as e-mail instead of having it on submission board

[alexandraFO]

Describe the issue or problem
Since we upgraded to OMP version 3.4, we have noticed that when we send a message to an author of a submission through the ‘Pre-review Discussions’ in the submission board, the author sends their reply as an e-mail instead of going to the submission board and replying in there. We prefer to have all the correspondence together in the submission board. The reply that was sent as an e-mail is not visible in the submission board, it can only be found in our e-mail.
I do not know, if this is because the author determines whether or not to reply as an e-mail or via the submission board, but we did not have this issue before we upgraded to 3.4, so there must be something that changed.
The author probably get an e-mail notification that there is a new discussion on the submission board, but is there anyway we can manage if they are able to just reply by e-mail or have to go and log in and answer in the submission board?

I took a screenshot of one e-mail I received from an author. I hope you can see, the author replyed to an automatic e-mail sent by our OMP server. I edited the e-mail to not show the message and name of the author. I cannot see from this e-mail how it is possible to reply to my personal e-mail (which is not noreply@kb.dk).

Steps I took leading up to the issue

1. Go to a specific submission - on the tab ‘Workflow’ → ‘Submission’
2. The author had made a letter to the editor. I clicked on the title of this message in the ‘Pre-review Discussions’.
3. I clicked ‘Add Message’ and wrote my message and clicked ‘OK’ to send it to the author. The message now appeared in the message thread.
4. I received a reply from the author by e-mail.
5. I went to the submission in OMP again, but the message that the author sent me in the e-mail was not present in the message thread mentioned above.

What application are you using?
OMP 3.4.0.7

[asmecher]

Hi @alexandraFO,

Previously, emails were sent with a generic notification (something like “there is new activity on your submission”), and it was necessary to click into OMP to read it. This guided users back into the system before interacting with content, but caused frustration because many users wanted to just see the action/content without having to log into OMP.

However, the change had the additional affect of allowing users to just respond to the email directly, causing the correspondence not to be captured in the system.

Our solution to this will likely be to permit OMP to receive emails directly, so that emailed responses are also captured. We’ve been doing some experimentation with this (pkp-lib and ojs github repositories), but have not yet scheduled it for a specific release.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[alexandraFO]

Hi @asmecher

Thank you for clearing this up for me. I am happy to hear that there is an explanation for this, although there does not seem to be a fix at the moment. Then we will have to copy the responses in ourselves, when needed.

I think it would be very nice, if you could allow OMP to capture emailed responses somehow in a future release.

Best regards,
Alexandra