Usually, communication with authors is accomplished via the submitting author only, and it works fine.
But in a few instances, we would want a discussion to include not only the submitting author but also the coauthors. I have tried with several dummy submissions, even marking the coauthor as corresponding one, and I cannot communicate with them.
Is it an option to do so?
Steps I took leading up to the issue
Go to any submission
Click on ‘add discussion’
You can select the author, editor, reviewers (if any)… but not coauthors
First, you can add the author to the participants list in the Workflow stage of the submission (make sure you add them as an author), after which, when you start a discussion their name will be included in the list of participants to choose from in discussions.
It doesn’t work for me, I cannot find what I’m doing wrong
1- In the workflow both coauthors appear (both have a role of “author”), I have additionally registered CoAuthor3 as “user” (role of “author”), and set CoAuthor2 as correspondence author.
I write this to clarify the answer of @rcgillis, which I didn’t understood, just in case other user may have the same problem.
1- The coauthor needs to be registered as an user (not just included as author by the submitting author, notice difference between ‘author’ [manuscript] and ‘user’ [platform]). In my case, CoAuthor3 is an user.
2- Then, they need to be assigned to the participants list (the image below)
3- Then they appear when a discussion is started.
Thanks for clarifying! Sorry - I was operating on the assumption that the co-author was a registered user in the system - this is indeed a requirement.
