OJS 3.0.2: global notificatios

Hi

I am reporting an issue identified by one of our seminal journals:
“It seems that there is no central mechanism in OJS for turning off notifications. If we were a commercial journal, this would be a real legal problem because we would be in breach of Canada’s anti-spam laws as a result.”

I am aware individual users / OJS admin can mange notifications via their profile - but is there a way to centrally mange which user role receive which notifications? Sorry if I have missed something simple in the system.
Rosarie .

Hi @rcoughlan,

We consider with privacy and anti-spam legislation in lots of jurisdictions – privacy legislation is particularly strong in Europe, for example, and the project is of course based mostly in Canada.

Broadly speaking, users in OJS will have an established relationship with the journal, typically through self-registration or submission, and that establishes the journal’s right to contact the user. Between that and permitting the author to unsubscribe from notifications, I believe that meets the broad requirements of legislation – though I’m not familiar in great detail with these laws. Is there a particular requirement that this approach doesn’t meet?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi Alec,

Here is a reply to your note, from the Editor - any thoughts? Please feel free to connect with him directly and cc myself FY. I will share his contact details by separate email.
Cheers
Rosarie

"First of all, our problem is not fundamentally about law and legal rights (although that is what sparked the PKP review of such things), it’s more about the simple annoyance of users (who are, after all, our pool of reviewers etc. and potentially do work for the journal) and the fact that there is no central control over the notifications that cause the annoyance. And many users who only do occasional reviews or who are simply just readers really don’t like to be told to interact with the website to change their settings etc. - especially because that’s what every website and online service tells them (us) to do.

As the Editor, I would like to be able to decide, for example, whether any announcement 1. is just placed on the website, or 2. is also sent out to a specific sub-group of users, or 3. is also sent to all those who have agreed to be contacted by the journal. I am pretty sure, for whatever reason it was, that 1. used to be the situation, and that it changed with the switch to OJS 3.x and now there appears to be no way to control settings on notifications, except for not having any at all.

The other things is, as we all know from research, that no-one reads the Terms of Service, and ToSs don’t really relate to user experience - what it feels like in practice to get what appears to be spam. It’s not really good enough to say that users understand their relationship to the journal or have agreed to everything that the software allows to happen, if even the editors can’t be fully aware of, or have control over, what that is. "

Hi @rcoughlan,

There’s an implementation of better control of this that’s already been completed and will be released in OJS 3.1. See the exhaustive details here: [OJS] Make notification emails for new announcements and issues optional in OJS3 · Issue #2561 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team