Feature request - content checking to prevent duplicate submissions

Hello all,

As the title of the topic suggests, we’d like to see OJS assist users in preventing “mistakes”. OJS should/must/could have a title, keywords, abstract, authorship and general metadata checking tool prior to/during submission, to prevent duplicate submissions on the system.
Our experience shows that the editorial team has a hard time keeping track of things, as we have to deal with multiple journals, submissions in different stages, and other activities related and unrelated to the journals, such as copyediting, translations, layouting, publishing, and other work we must do at our daily jobs.
This would prevent us from processing a repeated submission inadvertently, reducing editorial work load and time.

I know it is not too easy, but not too hard either. The issue would be on server processing. If the submission’s file content itself could be verified as well, that would be heaven, but probably unnecessary, as submission metadata would be enough. It should check for similar content, not exactly the same content.

Also, maybe asking the author if sumission ID XXX is the same as Submssion ID YYYY (presenting the metadata and ID without authorship), or if it’s an “update” on the research… that could happen… The system could notify editorial team of such issues as well (screen notifications, e-mail after submission, etc…)

Thank you!!

Dear @ramon,
i have the same problem when one author created two same submissions with the same title and other information. Or the same authors after revision created new submission and they thought that new submission is the same as revision. Then authors wait for assessment, but their article is send to review process again.
I see that you do not have any answer to your question.
Please can you inform us about this problem @asmecher
Is there some possibilities for finding duplicate submission?
Thank you
Lukas

Hello @Lukas_Hleba,

Unfortunately, I believe there’s no “solution” yet to this feature request.
Glad to see it’s not just us…
The only workaround still is having a procedure within the editorial team to check submission info and status.
We use a spreadsheet shared with the team on Google Sheets to keep track of things.
Although not perfect, it helps us keep track of things and sometimes find a repeated submission. We still need to access the system and check submissions individually, but that comes “with the turf”, right?
We’d love to add more “intelligence” and automation to OxS but if the author changes something within the article data (title, abstract, authors) it would be very difficult to automate. It may be one of those improvements that may prove too costly for the benefit…

Thank you for answer,
i will hope that function duplicate submission will exist sometime.
Lukas