Hello all,
During our experience as journal editors, we have come to the following needs we’d like to share in the hopes that they’ll make it somehow into the editorial workflow. Some may be impossible to implement within OJS and may require integration with third-party solution (even if it’s another PKP software):
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Enable author to provide feedback on review received.
Despite the review process being quite “common knowledge”, open journals need a way to qualify reviews to help improve the process continually. -
Allow editorial team to improve reviewer evaluation. The classification system is interesting, but it’s restricted to a number. A deeper and more qualified (although “subjective”) evaluation is needed. Enable editorial team to view a summary/notes on reviews while in the reviewer selection list is essential. Sometimes a reviewer doesn’t provide the review in a level that should be required, but end’s up weighing in the editorial decision. These notes will help in the selection criteria.
I hope these are clear enough to start the discussion.
In OJS 2 there’s a Submission Notes field which could provide that kind of information, if it could be “formatted” as a review form instead of just an open text field. Which is great to recording restricted submission events that are not recorded elsewhere, but they are of no easy access.
This “submission notes” is essential to editorial teams as a “submission checklist” for the editorial team to review the submission, defining quali-quantitative criteria for the “next generation” of editorial teams, provide historical records and better statistics.