The management of a scientific journal is important to ensure the efficiency of the article publishing process. As the editor-in-chief of the journal, I would recommend that you introduce a simple page into the PKP OJS publishing system on which the editor-in-chief or editor would immediately see the list of the articles with the following data:
Submission number
Article title
Editor responsible for the article
The phase of the publishing process
E-mail address of the editor and the corresponding author
This is a simple select from SQL…
Such page could be part of the OJS main menu in the backend.
With the management and number of articles in the process, you simply don’t have time to click, filter and search for who has the article assigned!
Manager need all data in one place to efectivelly manage the process.
As far as I can remember, something similar was part of the old versions of OJS. In the 14 years I have been working with OJS, I would finally welcome something simple and effective.
Have you ever considered the ergonomics of OJS? Do we really need so many clicks to do something within the system?
However, I like your new system, latest version? I am speechless. E.g. Publication tab. Every single item needs to be clicked and any change must be saved… 8 clicks instead of 1!!!
Do you think this has speeded up the publishing process? Not. Is it a problem that all items are on one page so that we don’t have to click through menu items?
Don’t get me wrong, think positive. I am looking forward to OJS improvements. I like your system, your work.
Peter Zajac
Editor-In-Chief
Slovak Journal of Food Siences
While I do agree that the user-friendliness could be improved by reducing the number of clicks needed and reducing the number of windows popping up (for example when adding documents) as well as making it a bit less heavy and eliminating some redundancies, I don’t think the aggressiveness underlying your post is appropriate.
In a world where you can choose to be anything you want, choose to be kind.
Hi @potravinarstvo,
The amount of data available on the dashboard’s submission list is an item of ongoing refinement. In OJS 2.x, the amount of data there gradually built without an overarching philosophy until it (like many other parts of the system) became overwhelming to use. As a result of user feedback, and in an attempt to intentionally design some of the more accreted parts of the UI, we moved to decrease the amount of information visible in OJS 3.x. Different users need different elements of that information, however, and we’re still trying to find a balance where users at journals of various size can find the information they need with a minimum of clicks balanced against information overload.
We have arrived at the current design through a mix of user feedback and UI/UX testing. One area of improvement that we’re working on is improved filtering tools, allowing editors to quickly narrow down the content they want to see from a potentially large list of submissions. You can see that work in progress e.g. at issues 4101 and 4172, both of which are currently planned for release in OJS 3.3.
OJS is free/open source software, and we depend on constructive community participation to compete with commercial vendors that have the funding to hire dedicated teams for UI/UX, accessibility, etc. If you’re able to propose some concrete improvements, we can see about knitting them into our UI/UX work. I will note that the submission lists are one of the most critical and complicated parts of the system, and it’ll be tough to come up with a single design that suits everyone.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team