OJS3 missing author roles in multi-journal installations

Feature Requests
1

Hi,

A typical problem in multi-journal installations is that a user has registered to journal A and later want’s to submit something to journal B as well. However, usually this is not possible, because the user does not have the author role in journal B.

Now I know that the user can edit her profile and add that role, but that is simply way too complicated for many users.

My suggestion:
When going to about/submissions page in journal B and clicking the Make a new submission button the user should get an opportunity to register herself as an author to journal B.

Basically instead of seeing this "The current role does not have access to this operation" the user should see something like "You are not registered as an author in journal B, would you like to register as an author?" and should have a simple button to perform this operation.

This would of course depent on the journal settings, whether it is possible to register as an author.

I know that "The current role does not have access to this operation" is a general message used for several similar cases, but I do find that this case is an exception and providing this mechanism would cover most of the problems with multi-journal user roles.

2

Not exactly the solution I described above, but way better than nothing: [OJS] The current role does not have access to this operation -message needs more details on how to acquire the needed role · Issue #2297 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

3

Hi @ajnyga,

Agreed, we can do better. We had a solution for this way back in OCS – the user would simply gain the required role if possible when the submission link was followed – but that approach won’t work with OJS 3.x/OMP because there may now be several submitting roles and we’ll need the author to choose one.

There’s a provision in the authorization framework for adding “advice” (see e.g. this change that causes non-existent monographs requests to respond with a 404), so it would be possible to cause the role checking policy to direct the user somewhere more useful, e.g. a listing of potential roles that permit self-registration and satisfy the role requirement.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team