Limiting multiple submissions for an author?

Software Support
1

I use OJS 3.1.2 and I’m wondering if there’s a way to limit multiple submissions for an author? Some authors misuse the system by too many concurrent submissions, which can violate some journal policies. If there is no such setting can someone hint on where should I look into the code to limit multiple concurrent submissions?

2

Hi @h.m,

There’s no built-in feature that would achieve that, and it’s not a common requirement from my experience. If you’re experiencing spamming, you might simply disable the problem accounts in the Users & Roles setup interface.

If you want to add a check, the easiest place to do it is probably on the first page of the submission process. See lib/pkp/classes/submission/form/SubmissionSubmitForm.inc.php and lib/pkp/templates/submission/form/step1.tpl.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Thanks. This is very helpful. The main reason to implement this feature is to reduce the burden of dealing with multiple submissions and manually reject the ones exceed the journal policies. Some journals do have this policy but perhaps this specific feature may not be a necessity.
One more point: to add a check in lib/pkp/classes/submission/form/SubmissionSubmitForm.inc.php, I’ll need to query the current user’s active submissions. I can of course do this by manually querying the database but it’d be a lot better to know which component in PKP I can use to do this?

4

Hi @h.m,

Have a look at the technical documentation, especially in regards to service classes: Services - Technical Documentation - OJS|OMP|OPS

There isn’t a 100% perfect tool in the submission service class that you could use to fetch only the submissions that the current user authored – the closest match is the assignedTo option (which can be passed into getMany, getCount, etc). It will give you a count of all submissions assigned to the current user, which will include things they’ve authored but also things they’re assigned to as editor etc. You’ll need to disambiguate between these cases, either by adding a better option to the service classes etc., or by iterating through the results you get and determining whether they’re relevant to include in the count.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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