Email Notification Recipients

Hi, We are running OJS 3.0.2, and I wanted to know if there is any documentation regarding who should receive email notifications of certain events. For example, when a new article is submitted, what determines who receives an email notification? All journal editors? Journal managers?

Thank you.

Thank you for this question. I’m interested in the answer too.

U

Hi all,

We don’t have any broad-based documentation for this at the moment, but feel free to ask about a notification that’s causing confusion and someone should be able to add some pointers.

For OJS 3.0.2:

I think you’re referring to one of two email templates – there’s SUBMISSION_ACK and SUBMISSION_ACK_NOT_USER (you can review the text of these in the emails list in setup). The SUBMISSION_ACK message goes to the sending user, and is blind-copied to anyone identified in Settings > Workflow > Submissions.

The SUBMISSION_ACK_NOT_USER message goes to any authors (besides the submitting user).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

I am also running OJS 3.0.2, and I am encountering a strange behavior with SUBMISSION_ACK
It is correctly sent to author (and to journal’s primary contact since the related box is checked in Settings > Workflow > Submissions [but no other contact is specified there]).
However, it is also sent to the Section Editor assigned to journal’s section to which the proposal was submitted. This mail is NOT appropriate for 2 reasons:

  1. Why should the Section Editor receive SUBMISSION_ACK at all when there is no place where a setting can be placed?

  2. If the Section Editor is to be notified of a completed submission to the relevant section, why send SUBMISSION_ACK, which behaves as if the section editor was the actual author (i.e… starting with “Hi Section Editor, thank you for your submission…”), while it would only make sense to have an email sent to Journal Editor notifying him/her that some OTHER author has submitted a new proposal.

I can’t seem to find any explanation on the forum on this behavior, nor on how to operate on this…
The only thing that I could think of was to log in as Section Editor > Profile > Notifications and manually disable email notifications when A new article, "Title," has been submitted. (but should this notification not be about the articles submitted by the user him/herself?).

Any suggestion is welcome.

Hi @afisher,

As you’ve noticed, OJS uses the submission acknowledgement message (sent to the author) to also notify the assigned editors/section editors. We didn’t think this warranted a separate email template for internal users.

I haven’t heard feedback on it being inappropriate to notify section editors – do you perhaps want to inhibit automatic assignment, or something else?

Assignments and notifications are areas where we have to strike a balance in a community that rarely converges on a single perfect solution – and we also try to avoid adding too many options, as the setup interface quickly becomes unworkably large that way. It may be that a local tweak is the best solution.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

Thank you for your prompt reply. My apologizes however, perhaps my comment was not clear.
IT IS appropriate to notify Section Editors that an Author has submitted a proposal to the journal.
It is confusing that such notification is the SUBMISSION_ACK itself, because Section Editors might be under the impression that THEY HAVE submitted a paper (which may occasionally happen when they are guest editors expected to introduce a thematic issue).
Hence, my request to be able to control/customize SUBMISSION_ACK.
Makes sense?
I am more then open to setup a local tweak, but would need a lead on where to start.

Regards,
Axel

Hi @afisher,

Have a look in classes/submission/form/SubmissionSubmitStep4Form.inc.php; this is where that email is composed and addressing is set up.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

Alright, thank you. I see where it happens: in classes/submission/form/SubmissionSubmitStep4Form.inc.php the following line copies SUBMISSION_ACK to the Section Editor(s) [SubEditors]

  	$mail->bccAssignedSubEditors($submission->getId(), WORKFLOW_STAGE_ID_SUBMISSION);

I am afraid I am not really able to modify this code to send another template to Section Editor(s), so I will simply customize the SUBMISSION_ACK (and SUBMISSION_ACK_NOT_USER) templates to clarify.

Thank you,

Axel

Hi @asmecher,

we have a same problem. It is confusing that the editor gets an email starting with “Dear Authorname”. Even, the link in the mail does not work for the editor, which is also a problem. Could you help us on how to modify the file you are mentioning? Thanks. We use OJS 3.1.0.1 for the moment.

Bogi

Hi @bog,

Watch Reduce the number of new submission notification emails for editors, and simplify their management · Issue #3770 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub for updates on this issue.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thanks! We will have a look. @mauser1, could you check if you could make 1) not to work, and 2) to work?

Thanks again,
Bogi