OJS 3.2.0.3 can’t find reviewer

My journal recently updated to OJS 3.2.0.3. An editor sometimes runs into an issue of not being able to find a reviewer. I managed to fix it by using the journal manager users & roles interface to find the reviewer, open their profile and save it (in one case, I added interests, in another I did not thing except open and save.

Before: searching for the user either to directly add a reviewer or to enroll an existing user as a reviewer, starting from Add Reviewer, resulted in no one found if I searched on name.

After “editing” the profile: user found starting from Add Reviewer and searching for their name.

I am not sure how consistently this happens as the update was recent and these assignments are to papers that were under review before the upgrade.

Any ideas?

Hi @philipmach,

I suspect the users have registered with the system (i.e. they have created user accounts), but have not indicated that they want to be a reviewer in your journal, thus do not have a reviewer role assignment. These reviewers can self-assign a reviewer role through their user profile, or it’ll be up to a journal manager or administrator to edit the user account and assign a reviewer role.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

I thought of that but no: even when they are registered as reviewers, I have to edit their profile and save it to make them visible, even without changing anything.

Best guess: the update to the current version broke something in the DB.

Any ideas how to fix that?

Hi @philipmach,

I’d suggest checking to see what you change in the database when you save the user account. Look for the user_id in the users, user_settings, and user_user_groups tables, before and after you save the account.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

This is a simple error (more exactly - multiple errors) of OJS 3.2.x. In our case we experienced the same problem by upgrading from OJS 3.1.2 to 3.2.1.

Now it is required that reviewers should have a record in user_settings with setting_name = “affiliation”. If not such record - a reviewer is not shown in the selection list. N.B. - the record may be empty.

Error 1: Despite “Affiliation” is required to register as a new user, furthermore, it is not an obligatory field, if a user edits its profile.

Error 2: If a user edits own profile, “Affiliation” may be empty and no setting is inserted into user_settings table. In a Journal Manager edits user data, an empty record is inserted into user_settings table.

Error 3: In older versions, “Affiliation” could be empty - but it is now obligatory. During the DB conversion, in such cases no empty records are inserted for “Affilation”.

I fixed this bug by inserting the missing empty records using the following script:

insert into user_settings(user_id, locale, setting_name, assoc_id, setting_value, setting_type, assoc_type)
select distinct(user_id), “en_US”, “affiliation”, 0, “”, “string”, 0 from user_settings where user_id not in (select user_id from user_settings where setting_name=“affiliation”);