Is there a way to contact readers (downloaders) of specific articles?

Software Support
1

Introduction

I am looking for creative ideas on ways to solicit additional feedback from the readers or downloaders of particular articles. I’m not finding anything similar in the forum or docs, so maybe someone can point me in a fruitful direction.

Background

The journal is a forum for instructors to get peer feedback on classroom activities they write. One section of the journal will share activities for classroom testing.

The journal is set up so that only registered users can download content. OJS 3.1.2-4 on a Ubuntu server.

The approach I looked at but don’t see how to make work

I thought I might generate a report of all readers (downloaders) of articles in the “Activities for Testing” section of the journal over the last month. Then I could take the report csv ; somehow extract the user information and email addresses ; some-other-how programmatically generate emails sending them to a Qualtrics survey to solicit their feedback on the specific activity they downloaded.

The place I am stuck is … the very first step. I see in the reports how to generate the number of views for the article, pdf, and html (or whatever) but… no record of who those readers were. Which sort of kills the whole approach, if that is a true limitation.

Questions

  1. Is there a way to get the user credentials of readers of an article in a report?
  2. Can you imagine a different way to get a list of who reads (downloads) an article other than generating a report through the statistics tools?
  3. Is there a way to create a custom log of readers of each article?
  4. Can you think of a totally different way for me to reach out to readers of specific articles?
  5. How have you solved a related problem?
2

The user is not associated with the action of downloading an article in the current data model. Such an association could be created by writing a plugin.

On the other hand, this project sounds essentially like having a review workflow on the articles. Are you already using OJS’s built-in review functionality? What blockers do you see to using that as it stands currently?

3

Hi @ctgraham. Yes, we plan to use the builtin peer review process. (That is a big reason we are using OJS to start with!) One challenge we are facing is that a type of peer review we really want to collect is real classroom feedback (more than just a traditional “paper review”). It is so hard to get referees to commit to use an activity, then it takes potentially many weeks or several months for them to get to the right point of the the right course to use the activity… It makes for a real challenge. So we were thinking that if we could harvest the information of instructors who are actually downloading the activities for classroom testing, then maybe we could leverage them as well.

The plugin idea is interesting. I will investigate!