Describe the problem you would like to solve
When an author starts a conversation, they are asked to choose from a list of all the participants associated with the manuscript. In some cases, it would be desirable to hide certain participants. Here are a few examples:
- One of the participants is an “associate editor” who would like to remain anonymous. When their name is in the participant list, the author can determine who the associate editor was.
- The editor may have asked another editor to look at a submission in order to give confidential advice. The author, however, can see this person in the participant list.
- Non editorial “administrators” or “technical staff” might sometimes need to be added to the participant list for technical reasons. In most cases, the authors should not need to contact these people.
I note that an issue like this was opened in 2017: [OJS] Provide option to add "hidden" participants to submissions · Issue #2430 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub but that it was closed as there was no interest at the time. It seems to me that it is time to re-open this issue!
Describe the solution you’d like
There are a couple ways this could be solved:
- When adding a participant, there could be a check box “Hide participant from author”
- By clicking on the blue arrow next to each participant, one could add a toggle “hide from author”
Who is asking for this feature?
I am the editor in chief of diamond open access journal. Our editorial policy is that the Editor will always be named, but that lower-level “associate editors” who provide recommendations or who help with various aspects of the review process are by default anonymous. Anonymity of the associate editors can not be assured in the current state: When an author starts a conversion, they will see the names of any associate editors assigned to the paper.