We have an interesting situation here as we have an author who is going to be joining the Editorial board. However, obviously we don’t want them to see the names of the reviewers on their paper.
I assume that in becoming an editor or section editor they will still have enough access to the system to find this information if they wanted too? Or does the fact that they’re the author of a submission still prevent them from seeing this for their own published submission?
Hey,
to answer from my position as managing editor:
Someone with the role ‘editor’ has access to every information. This role should get assigned only to the editor-in-chief (who should be of integrity and above such things as resenting reviewers for a bad review) and the managing editor (who does not publish papers). Both should be able to access all submissions to solve possible issues, answer urgent questions from any party and provide technical support.
All editorial board members get the section editor role. They only have access to manuscripts they processed themselves. This is also true for all published articles. Unfortunately, they do also not see the ‘unassigned’ list with incoming submissions. You have to create ‘journal sections’ for automatic assignment according to their topic of interest then and advise them to redirect submissions which they have a conflict of interest with (former co-worker, direct competitor, …) to the editor-in-chief.
I’m about to organize the review process for the first time, and I also have this problem, since one the other editors will submit a paper. We do not have journal sections that belong to each member of the editorial board based on topic of interests, and as a general rule I would prefer to be able discuss all the submissions with the entire board. I only want to prevent the editors from seeing their own papers.
Would it work if each member of the editorial board apart from the editor-in-chief got their own personal section, and that the editor in chief then assigns all the papers to all the individual editor-sections with the exception of the ones that they have submitted themselves?
Another solution I thought about was to “demote” the editor to a section editor for the issue, conduct the review process, delete the paper with review history, and then re-upload it before he gets to be a normal editor again.
Hi @johns,
Anyone with a full editor account will be able to access the history (including reviews) of any paper in that journal, so you’ll need to demote your Editor to Section Editor as long as the submission’s review content is in OJS. You could either temporarily demote them and remove the review content after the process is complete, as you propose, or you could perform that submission’s review outside of OJS. I would suggest the latter, and returning to the OJS workflow at the point where (mediated) review content is communicated back to the author.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Thanks for the reply a while back. I’d rather not have the review process done outside the system, since this involves maintaining two sets of systems to deal with reviews (I would probably use google docs sharing for this). I just discovered that I will probably also need to use members of the ed boards as reviewers, so this introduces an additional need to give selective access to the papers in question. I have now implemented my own solution with giving each editor his own section, in order to arrange selective access to the submitted papers. I have no idea if this will work yet, I need to try it out. It seems to me that the system would benefit from additional functionality here. I seem to recall that the Openconf system has a consultation function, for example.
Hi @johns,
OJS 3.0 will permit more flexibility in roles, and also has consultation features. Hopefully when it’s released in a few months it’ll address the functionality you were missing here.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team