We are using OMP (the latest version) but we are using it in an unconventional way and have discovered that it is not working as we would like and hoped.
We ask that authors submit a proposal that is reviewed by our editorial board for suitability. So the initial submission by an author is a couple files – their CV, a proposed chapter list, and a book proposal. See Submissions | Books@Atla Open Press
If the editorial board approves their proposal, the author will be invited to submit a manuscript. But we have discovered that authors cannot add additional files, namely the chapters or full manuscript, to their initial submission (the book proposal). Editors have the ability to add additional files – but it doesn’t appear that authors can actually see these (and even then, this means the author is emailing the Word docs to the editors to be uploaded).
Our intention is to use the system to do an initial internal review of the book proposal, invite submission of the manuscript, and then do an external review on the manuscript file (our preference though is for each chapter to be uploaded as individual files rather than the full manuscript as a single file – AND we would like the chapters to be uploaded as they are finished and not all at once to help manage the workload of our volunteer editorial board).
However – we cannot do this because there is no way (that we see) for authors to add files to their book proposal initial submission.
Am I just not seeing how to do this (other than starting a discussion and attaching files – which is not a clean and effective way of doing this at all from a later copyediting and layout point of view) – or is there some workaround (other than giving authors the role of editor which would then allow them to be privvy to reviews!)
We have built our entire workflow around the presumption of this functionality and were very dismayed to discover last week that the system will not work this way.
Help and comments please!
Christine Fruin (ATLA)