We are currently testing the ORCID plugin as per several journals’ requests. Our OJS version is 3.2.1-3 and our plugin version is 1.1.2.7.
We have noticed that it is possible for submitting authors to request authorisation from their co-authors for OJS to update their respective ORCID profiles in step 3 of the submission process. This means that authorisation requests can be generated by the submitting author when the submission process has not even been completed.
This results in e-mails that lack an article title and look like they have been sent by the journal (since the principal contact is automatically used as sender) when they have in fact been sent by the submitting author. In our opinion this cannot be intended behaviour since it is highly misleading and the generated e-mail looks very dubious with the main piece of information missing, e.g.:
Dear John Doe,
You have been listed as an author on the manuscript submission “” to Testjournal.
Please allow us to add your ORCID id to this submission and also to add the submission to your ORCID profile on publication.
[…]
More about ORCID at Testjournal
If you have any questions, please contact me.
John Smith [i.e. the name of the journal’s principal contact]
In our opinion only journal managers/editors should be able to send authorisation requests and even then this should only be possible after the initial submission has been completed. Or is there a reason why authors need to be able to do this that we are just not seeing? To avoid confusion: It’s completely acceptable that submitting authors can input their co-authors’ ORCID, but they should not be able to send authorisation requests on behalf of the journal they are submitting to.
In addition, the link to the ORCID info at the journal itself (in the request e-mail) leads to a mixture of German and English text if the German interface language is used.
Maybe @Dulip_Withanage can weigh in on this? Thank you in advance.
In our opinion only journal managers/editors should be able to send authorisation requests and even then this should only be possible after the initial submission has been completed. Or is there a reason why authors need to be able to do this that we are just not seeing?
The reason we decided for this solution was that in large journlas where journal managers to reduce workload and allow authors to request the authorization. As you point out, this can be misleading, when the title is not yet included in the submission.
We are planning a better integration of orcids in OJS in future versions and specifying the requirements and please add your suggestions there.,
To avoid confusion: It’s completely acceptable that submitting authors can input their co-authors’ ORCID, but they should not be able to send authorisation requests on behalf of the journal they are submitting to.
Here, I would prefer more opinions from the community. May be a seperate email template indicating it is an author request can also an alternative approach.
Thank you for the swift reply! Regarding your suggestion of a separate template: This would definitely improve the situation, but the email should only be sent once the submission process has been completed. Otherwise there is no title metadata that could be added to the email and in our opinion the email absolutely needs an article title to look reliable. Do you want us to add this to the requirements via GitHub?
We will look into the missing translation on Weblate and contribute there.