Option for Author Responses to Reviewer Ratings/Comments via a Form?

Software Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently using a review form in OJS where reviewers rate specific items on a 1 to 10 scale and provide comments for each. Ideally, after the first review round, authors would be able to see these ratings and comments in a form and respond directly. This form would display the reviewer’s rating and comment as read-only fields, with a text box underneath each item for the author to reply.

From my exploration and testing, I haven’t seen an existing workflow in OJS that supports this. If I were to develop a plugin for this functionality, what would be the best approach? Since it would require modifications across the submission workflow, I’m curious how feasible this might be and if anyone has advice on the core aspects to focus on.

Any guidance or suggestions for setting this up would be incredibly helpful!

Thank you!

2

Hi @bilalelkhouly,

Interesting use case! I won’t be able to speak to the specifics of what code to target with such a plugin, but I did want to point out our plugin development guide, in case you haven’t seen it, that provides some general guidance on plugin development: https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/dev/plugin-guide/en/

Hopefully one of our development team or community members can provide some more specific advice, but, in the meantime, I did want to hightlight that guide, and also wanted to request that you indicate which specific version that you would likely be working from to develop such a plugin (e.g. 3.3.0-13, or 3.4.0-7), as that will have an impact on the code development.

Best regards,

Roger
PKP Team

3

Hi @rcgillis ,

Thanks for the guidance! I’m currently working with OJS version 3.4.0.7.

I’ve actually reviewed the plugin development documentation quite a bit already, as I’ve developed a custom plugin to introduce sliders as a new item type in the review form. This allows reviewers to input ratings via sliders, which has been a useful addition for our workflow.

I’m still exploring how feasible it might be to develop a more complex plugin to enable the author response functionality as described. If you or anyone on the development team has insights on structuring such a plugin—especially given the need to integrate it within the existing review and submission workflow—I’d appreciate any pointers!

Thank you!

1 Like