OJS: When requesting revisions on a submission, there is no way to send an email to the authors, to let them know they need to resubmit

Describe the issue or problem
When requesting revisions on a submission, there is no way to send an email to the authors, to let them know they need to resubmit.

Steps I took leading up to the issue
For example:

  1. As a journal editor, go to a submission’s “view” page, on the “workflow” → “review” tab.
  2. Click on “Request Revisions”, select “Revisions will be subject to a new round of peer reviews” and click “next”.
  3. This page is titled “Notify Reviewers”, and indeed, it will send emails to reviewers.
  4. There is no way to send an email to authors, to let them know that they should resubmit the paper.

What application are you using?
OJS 3.4.0-1

Additional information
In OJS 3.3.0-14, on step 3, the editor was presented with a page that would compose an email to authors, and not to reviewers.

Hi @mgax,

Hmmm… odd. I tested this and when I selected “Request Revisions” I did get the message to the author and not the reviewer. I wonder if this is because you multiple rounds enabled? I see that you have a message that “The submission must be resubmitted for another review round” Not totally sure, but it might be worth running a second round to be sure - even with a test user.

-Roger
PKP Team

Hi @rcgillis, thanks for looking into this!

I’ve created a new user and made a new submission, went through a round of review, and clicked “Request Revisions”, and indeed, the first email composer was “Notify Authors”. I think the review in the screenshots had been submitted “as journal manager”.

However, there are dozens of submissions on the real (non-Sandbox) journal, which were created by self-registered users with no manager/editor role, which exhibit the same behaviour: clicking “Request Revisions” directly offers to send email to reviewers and not to authors.

I wonder if this is because you multiple rounds enabled?

Is this a per-journal setting or do you mean that the submission has an additional review round started? I can’t find any such setting, and no, the submission doesn’t have a second review round yet.


I’m not familiar with the database schema of OJS, but if there’s a field that I might query to debug the state of the submissions, let me know, and I’ll happily run the query :slight_smile:
Thanks again for your time!

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, I thought that in the case of this submission it might have treated the round of review as having been completed, and thus was then defaulting to the communication with the reviewers and not the author. I could be wrong,
and not being able to see the submission and only operating from my own testing configuration and not what you might have enabled, it’s difficult for me to tell…

Good question. I’ll follow-up with our developers and run this by them to see if they can chime in.

-Roger
PKP Team

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Is there any update to this issue? We recently updated the OJS version, and now the option to notify the author is missing. Only Notify Reviewer option is available:

Were you able to check with the developers? Thank you.

Hi @pcansf,

I never did hear back on this one, but will follow up again.

-Roger
PKP Team

Hello,
some time has passed.
Any news regarding this?
Does it has been fixed in the latest available build?

Hi all,

Do you have any author assigned to the submission review workflow? Check under “Participants” to make sure someone is listed under that heading.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Alec, could you please share a screenshot of how it should look like?

@asmecher thanks for the pointer! On a test submission, there was indeed no author assigned. On our live instance, there was an author assigned, but the roles were not set up properly: Authors did not have permission for the “Review” stage.

After assigning this permission, the authors (who were already assigned to the submission) also showed up in the “Participants” box. Thanks, problem solved!

@Garant here is what the “Participants” box should look like when there is an author assigned:

2 Likes

Hi @mgax,

Great, glad to hear it!

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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