ISSUE: Decline Submission email notification not sent to Author

I’ve encountered an issue while the submission is declined by the editor. When a decision is made by the EDITOR to decline the submission based on the reviewer feedback. It is expected to trigger an email to the Author about the decision made by the EDITOR. However in our case when a decision to decline the submission is made it triggers an email to the REVIEWER Thanking him for the Review. Even after skipping the email (from the option provided by OJS to SKIP EMAIL). The decision is recorded and stored however there is no email notification to the Author regarding the Decision.

We are using OJS 3.4.0.1

Attaching the Screen recording of the Issue with steps below:
Reviewer Feedback Clip
Reviewer Login
Editor Decision Clip
Editor Login

Thank You,

Best Regards,
Anil

Any help is much appreciated !

Hi @Anil,

I’m unable to reproduce the issue on the latest 3.4.0. Also, the clip doesn’t show the email sending form with the wrong template. I can only guess that the issue might be upgrade related.

Hi @Vitaliy,

Thank you for the response. Ours is a fresh/first installation of 3.4.0.1, we did not upgrade/update from any lower version. Anyways will upgrade to 3.4.0.5 by end of May 2024 and see if this get fixed. Until such time shall mange.

Hello,
We’re seeing pretty much the same issue here under OJS 3.4.0.3. I need to do more tests with our users again as i’m unable to reproduce the issue on a separate test instance of 3.4.0.3.

If i recall correctly, we had the same behavior for the emails. The step to send an email to the author didn’t happen, it went straight to the email thanking the reviewer.

The template for “Submission Declined” exists and looks correct.

Could it be a configuration or settings inside OJS ?

1 Like

I did some testing.

  • Login as an author
  • Submit an article
  • Login as an editor
  • Accept and send submission into review
  • Assign a reviewer
  • Login as reviewer
  • Recommend: Decline submission
  • Login as editor
  • In the review tab, Decline submission.

In our production environment, here is what i see:

In my test environment, the behavior is as expected:

My test environment has very little data compared to our production instance.

Any suggestions or ideas ?

1 Like

The problem in our case was that the Author role didn’t have access to the “Review” step in the Roles. This fixed the strange behavior we had.