OJS 3 - Submissions appearing as active

Hi everyone,

In our recently migrated instance (OJS 3.0.2), we have some submissions appearing under the “Active Submissions” and “Unassigned” areas that have already been published. I had a look at this forum post with the same problem, but the solutions there didn’t apply. Any ideas on what might be missing or incorrect? I’m assuming it’s something in the database, but am just not sure what to look for exactly.

Here’s the JSON for one of the submissions that’s causing issues, from the submissions table in our database:

{
	"data":
	[
		{
			"submission_id": 2605,
			"locale": "en_US",
			"context_id": 13,
			"section_id": 105,
			"language": null,
			"citations": null,
			"date_submitted": "2010-07-13 08:01:11",
			"last_modified": "2010-07-13 08:01:11",
			"date_status_modified": "2010-07-13 08:01:11",
			"status": 3,
			"submission_progress": 0,
			"current_round": 1,
			"pages": null,
			"fast_tracked": 0,
			"hide_author": 0,
			"stage_id": 1
		}
	]
}

And here’s the entry from the issues table:

{
	"data":
	[
		{
			"issue_id": 356,
			"journal_id": 13,
			"volume": 2,
			"number": "4",
			"year": 2004,
			"published": 1,
			"current": 0,
			"date_published": "2004-11-01 00:00:00",
			"date_notified": null,
			"access_status": 1,
			"open_access_date": null,
			"show_volume": 1,
			"show_number": 1,
			"show_year": 1,
			"show_title": 1,
			"style_file_name": null,
			"original_style_file_name": null,
			"last_modified": null
		}
	]
}

Hi @kaitlin,

Are these submission that began in OJS 3.x, or were published in OJS 3.x after migrating in progress from 2.x, or migrated in an already-published state from OJS 2.x?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

These were published prior to migration, in OJS 2.x, then migrated to OJS 3.

Hi @kaitlin,

What does the published_submissions entry for this article look like?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

Assuming the submission_id is the same across the database, it looks like this one is missing from the published_submissions table. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! They must not have gotten migrated over somehow.

Edit: It looks like this article was imported, would that make a difference in where it should appear in the database?

Hi again @asmecher,

I may be mixing up my id numbers. In the backend admin interface, I see the ID listed as 2605, but then in the published article URL, the number is 3358 (People Watching People | Surveillance & Society). In my published_submissions table, I can see a submission_id entry for 3358.

Edit:

In the submission_settings table, I can see entries for both 3358 and 2605, with the exact same content. I guess my main question is, is it safe to wipe everything from the database for submission_id 2605? It looks like the published submission is under the other id.

Hi @kaitlin,

For published submissions, you should see entries in both published_submissions and submissions with the same submission_id. That should also correspond to the ID in the URL (unless you’re using custom identifiers, which should be non-numeric in order to avoid confusing OJS). Ignore the published_submissions.pub_id column, if that’s what you’re looking at.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher,

It looks like I somehow have duplicate entries in the submissions table for the article, but with different submission_id numbers. The one that is not in the final publication is the one that is showing up in our active submissions, and also does not have an entry in the published_submissions table. I can tell they’re duplicate because they have the same information in the submission_settings table.

Do you think it’s safe to go ahead and delete the old entry that’s showing up as active, since it isn’t the final published submission? I can also send a db dump if it would be helpful. Based on what I can see in the editorial history, these submissions were imported.

Hi @kaitlin,

I suspect the duplicates were failed imports, or duplicated imports. Yes, it should be safe to delete them. (Of course, take a backup of your database and files directory before you do – always a good practice.)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team