OJS 3 - notifications emails from journals on adminitrator email cannot be switched off on multi-journal platform

Dear all,
I’m an adminstrator of a multi-journal OJS-installation. After upgrading to OJS 3 in February this year, we started getting emails alerts in our mail system whenever the individual journals sent out call for papers, at new submissions, etc… Especially annoying are the returns of invalid emails of users in the journals.

How do we switch this feature off? I have already tried to remove email notifications but this doesn’t solve the problem?

billede

Kind regards,
Louise

Hi @lthomsen,

Notifications of things like new submissions can be controlled in in 3 ways:

  • Go to Workflow Settings > Submissions and check off whether you want a copy of the Notification of Author Submission sent to the primary contact identified in Journal Settings.
  • Individual users can visit their own user profiles, go to the Notifications tab, and check off what email notifications to receive (as you mentioned in your post)
  • If you don’t want an email notification message to be used at all, you can disable it under Workflow Settings > Emails. Please note that if you, for example, disable the “submission ack” message, it will not get sent to editors, journal managers, or authors.

However, there is a bug identified with OJS 3.1 where even after un-checking these, journal managers and editors continue to receive notifications (see Reduce the number of new submission notification emails for editors, and simplify their management · Issue #3770 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub). It should be fixed in the next major release of OJS.

In terms of getting returns of invalid emails of users in the journal, you can stop these by disabling the user accounts so these users no longer receive announcements.

I hope that’s helpful.

Best,
Amanda Stevens
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like

Hi Amanda,

Thank you very much for your reply and suggestions. It is, however, none of the three options, that you mention, so I believe it must be the bug referred to, that causes all the email notifications. I will keep an eye on whether this is resolved in the next major release of OJS.

Kind Regards,

Louise

I am using 3.1.2.2 and all section editors are notified of every submission even though “Send a copy to the primary contact, identified in the Journal Settings” is checked and I added no additional emails.

I unchecked this option and put my own email address into the box – I hope this will stop the notifications to all section editors, which is annoying.

Is this going to be fixed some time soon?

Hi @philipmach,

Section Editors should only be notified of a submission if it comes to a section that they are assigned to. However, there were some unexpected email notification issues caused by the new editorial report feature in the 3.1.2-2 release, so upgrading to 3.1.2-4 may solve your problem.

Best,
Amanda Stevens
Public Knowledge Project Team

In my case the journal has one category of section editor so ALL get notifications even if I do not assign them to a particular paper until I have had the opportunity to take them off. Is there something I can set up so only the editor gets notified when a new paper comes in?

Not clear that the fix you describe addresses this.

Even if I do divide them into Computer Science and Information systems, I don’t want section editors to get announcements of new papers as (a) I assign them and (b) some are bad enough for desk rejects and I don’t want to bother them with those.

Hi @philipmach,

I’m sorry for my late reply. Do you have any users assigned to the Journal Editor role on your site? If you already resolved this issue you can disregard this message.

Thanks,
Amanda Stevens
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi all,

I don’t know why I don’t have submission notification key in my workflow. Could you please guide me?

Thank you