OJS 3.3 (and others): why is Country a mandatory field for Contributors, and where does that information appear or get shared?

Software Support
1

Question stemming from curiosity rather than a problem, although it does have an implication for editorial practice:

I’ve always been confused about why Country is a mandatory field in the Contributor record in OJS 3. Why is that the case? When is this information used?

The biggest implication of whether or not this is useful information would be when uploading back files of journals migrating to OJS. For example, I recently had a journal migrate to OJS with a backfile roughly 30 years and 700 articles deep - determining the author’s location and even entering the information in QuickSubmit is non-trivial at that scale. So, why would we not just enter “Afghanistan” (the first in the list) for everyone?

2

Some indexing agencies look for geographic diversity of both the editors and the authors. See Guide to academic journal indexing: Where, when, and how to get indexed

3

Thank you @kmccurley . I get that it’s potentially useful but I don’t see why it should be mandatory, nor do I understand what call exposes that metadata.

4

I don’t form policy for what PKP requires, so I am unable to explain why it would be mandatory. The schema doesn’t seem to have country as a required field, so maybe this is a requirement imposed by some plugin you are using.

I suppose it could be confusing for some of our authors who live in one country but work in another, or for authors who have multiple affiliations in different countries. They would have no idea which one to choose. Our journals only seem to display author country from the affiliations field, so I don’t think it’s mandatory on our instance. We only use the quickSubmit plugin, so authors would never see the decision anyway.

5

@kmccurley the question was why it’s mandatory.

Schema documentation notwithstanding, it displays and operates as a required field in the UI, including in QuickSubmit. Learning OJS doesn’t address it directly but you can see the required field flag in the screenshot. We’re running 3.3.0.19 and a couple cases of 3.4.something but it shows as a required Contributor field for as long as I can remember (5+ years), across versions and across instances with different plugins.