[Multi Journal Installation] Allowing Journal Managers to register/invite previously registered users

Describe the issue or problem
We have an installation with many journals. Each of these journals has their own journal managers. As our database of users grow, we are running into issues where journal managers try to invite a reviewer, but can’t as their mail-addresses are already registered with another journal.
As administrator, I can solve this using the ‘show users not registered with these journal’-checkbox. Users themselves can also register with other journals through their account settings.
Neither of these solutions, however, solve the speedbump of trying to invite a reviewer and not being able to without either contacting the administrator, or the reviewer themselves through another medium.

I have found this issue on Github, indicating this is a topic of some priority that has, however, seemingly not been solved yet.

As this is a topic of great frustration for our journal managers, I would like to ask a few questions so I know I am communicating the right things to them:

  • Am I correct in saying this has not been solved yet?
  • Is it known if this might be fixed in the (semi-)near future? Is it on the roadmap somewhere?
  • Are there any ways of dealing with this problem that I have not listed yet?

We’d appreciate any info or help we can get on this, even if it just means being sure we’ll have to disappoint our journal managers on this issue for the time being. The great work everyone involved with OJS does is much appreciated!

What application are you using?
OJS 3.3.0.7.

1 Like

Hi @KayWP,

Thanks for your post and your comments of appreciation. I know that this is a common point of discussion and it has been on our development team’s radar for some time as a matter to address. Your assessment that this has not been resolved yet is correct. It is labelled as a community priority, but it has not yet, been scheduled towards a release of the software. Although, it is noted in the roadmap [line 45 as of this writing] as planned for version 3.5, so a solution is planned, but just further down the road (please note that even though certain features may be planned for a given release of the software, they may not always make it into that particular release for various reasons). To give you a sense of how far away that it is: we plan to release 3.4 in a few months (although that timeline is not set in stone), and there is usually a new release every year, so 3.5 would be realistically scheduled for a year and a few months from now. As far as workarounds go, I don’t think so (apart from users using distinct emails to register for new accounts, which isn’t always feasible). But certainly others may wish to weigh in if they’ve found other workarounds (I’d be curious to know myself!). I hope, at the very least, this gives some insight into the issue and where it stands in relation to current development plans and priorities.

Best regards,

-Roger
PKP Team

Hi @rcgillis ,

Thank you for your swift and complete answer.

This way, I know for sure that we need to work around this issue for the time being.

As a follow-up question:

I am trying to formulate an email template that editors can send to reviewers who are already in the database. The email would be a request to the author: “could you sign up as a reviewer with our journal through your profile settings?”

Ideally, I’d like to provide a link to the place where the reviewer could change these settings. However, all the paths to this location that I can find are journal-dependent: e.g. /[name of a journal]/user/profile.

Is there a path that could link any reviewer to their profile settings without knowing what other journal within our multi-journal installation they are registered with?

I hope this question is clear: please ask for more information if you need it.

Hi @KayWP,

Interesting… Creating the template could be easy enough and done within the email settings: https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/learning-ojs/en/settings-workflow#email-templates

However, making the connection between the email template in the manner that you’ve described would require some custom coding, I think, and that’s not my strength, unfortunately. I’ll see if some other team members can weigh in on how one might go about this.

-Roger
PKP Team

Hi @KayWP,

You need a URL specific to the journal, because user roles are restricted to each journal. In other words, a reviewer can only sign up to be a reviewer in a journal.

The best thing you can probably do is run a string replace to insert the correct URL in your email template before you show it to the editor, or after the editor has created the email and before it is sent. For example if you template was:

$template = 'Please <a href="{$userProfileUrl}">login</a> to your account.';

Then you can run the following to insert the correct URL:

$context = $request->getContext();
$url = $request->getDispatcher()->url(
        request,
        PKPApplication::ROUTE_PAGE,
        $context->getPath(),
        'user',
        'profile'
    );
$template = str_replace('{$userProfileUrl}`, $url, $template);
2 Likes

Thank you everyone for your responses.

In my opinion the biggest hurdle with sending an email WITHIN the system is that I don’t think a journal manager can send an email from within OJS to someone who’s not registered with their journal yet. So that somewhat defeats the purpose.

If there are no journal-agnostic links to the profile settings where you can edit your role (so you could at least send the email OUTSIDE the system), I’m afraid this plan won’t work. Thank you all for your input!