Managing workflow

trevor · August 11, 2020, 3:06am

I think it would be very helpful to have a one-stop visual layout of all the articles currently in process, and where they are in that stage. I’ve been jumping around so much, so I finally made an excel spreadsheet with columns for Title, Author, if sent for review, reviewer 1 name, reviewer 2 name, decision. That way I can see all of the submissions and where they are in the process all at once, and I just update it as reviews or new submissions come in. The OJS is very cumbersome when it comes to managing workflow, though you can see them under submissions.

NateWr · August 11, 2020, 10:10am

Thanks @trevor, this aligns with other feedback we’ve gotten on how to improve the submissions lists. We have a number of ideas and improvements we plan to work on. The most relevant to your request is probably this one about improving the visibility of where a submission is within the review stage:

github.com/pkp/pkp-lib

Improve visualisation of review stage status

opened 10:19AM - 22 Oct 18 UTC

NateWr

Major Feature

**As an** editor **I want** to get a rough sense of a submission's progress thr…ough peer review _at-a-glance_ **so that** I can more easily manage and track a large number of submissions, and compare their progress quickly. This issue builds on UI/UX feedback and discussions in https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/4103 and https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/1662, which highlight the desire for more fine-grained status reporting from the submissions list. Most of this feedback focuses on the Review stage and it is the stage with the fewest technical obstacles to providing more fine-grained status. Within the review stage we have the following indicators we can use to signal progress: - How many reviewers are assigned in the current round - How many reviewers have accepted/declined in the current round - How many reviewers have completed their review in the current round - Has a request revisions editorial decision been made since the current round was initiaited - Have revisions been submitted since the last editorial decision was made - How many review rounds have been initiated - How many days a submission has been in a review round or the whole review stage Figuring out how best to represent progress will require some experimentation. We discussed the possibility of using a progress bar, which would give a very quick comparison but lacks detail about why a particular progress level is calculated. This could maybe be compensated with information it the dropdown display. A dot-system has been proposed at https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/4103 with the caveat that interpretation of the dots be difficult without specific training. I have assigned this to the 3.2 milestone because it was considered a high priority for UI/UX improvements. However, because that milestone is already overloaded this shouldn't be taken as a promise that it will make the deadline.