OJS 3.1.1.2: System-initiated rating of the reviewers

Software Support
1

Hi,

our editors were a bit surprised to see a one star reviewer rating for reviewers, they have not rated yet - and would (from earlier expericence) rate much higher …
Our tests seem to show that just the fact, that a reviewer accepts to review an article, automatically triggers the first star.
Is this intended or a bug?
Tthis is a posibly misleading (because still incomplete) information for other editors when choosing a reviewer - or even “forces” an editor to rate the reviewer even if he if he did not want to use the rating feature.

2

@NateWr knows about stars (ping).

3

If no completed reviews have been rated, they should definitely not see a star rating for a reviewer. When upgrading to 3.1.1, the system should automatically set any reviewer ratings with a 0 to null, thereby making them ignored.

Do you have access to technical support for your instance of OJS? If so, can you ask them to check the values in the review_assignments table for the quality column? If you’re indeed seeing 1, for one-star, for all of your review assignments, that may suggest some old data in the system needs to be cleaned up. If you’re seeing 0, that may suggest that the upgrade script did not complete successfully.

Either way, we should be able to provide a short SQL command that your technical support can run to clean that up.

4

Dear @NateWr

I guess it’s no problem of older records (or the database) being updated (if I understand your comment correctly) – we tested with a new submission, requested a freshly created reviewer – and immediately after he stated “I accept” he earned one star …

Thanks for looking into this
Sabrina

5

Hi @sabrinaeck,

Thanks for this. I have been able to reproduce this and it is an error in the platform. I’ve filed an issue and I hope we will get it fixed for the next version or the one after that.

In the meantime, it sounds like you have a lot of existing reviewers in the system who are showing 1/5 ratings, who have never been rated. If you have technical support for your journal, you can reset all of the 0 ratings in your system with the following SQL command:

update review_assignments set quality=NULL where quality=0;