Reinstating reviewer not working

As noted in this post: https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/how-to-reinstate-reviewer-if-reviewer-declined/79218
it does not seem to be working to cancel and then reinstate reviewers.

If a reviewer declines a review request and then changes her mind, we want to be able to reinstate her. The reinstating itself works, but once reinstated, the reviewer still doesn’t have access to the files.

Steps I took leading up to the issue

  1. Reviewer declined review request
  2. Reviewer changed mind
  3. Go to Reviewer - Cancel reviewer
  4. The option to Reinstate reviewer now appears. Click on it.
  5. When the reviewer logs in, the submision they were reassigned to does not show up

What application are you using?
OJS 3.3.0-14

We don’t want to start a new review round because there are other reviewers who have not yet responded to Review round 1.

Is this functionality not behaving as expected? Or are we missing some step in the process?

Hi @Ramfra,

Thanks for your post. I tested this and got the same result. I’ll run this by our development team to see what they have to say.

-Roger
PKP Team

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Hi @Ramfra,

It’s indented behaviour and designed for editors who accidentally cancel the review request.
The feature that you are looking for was implemented in 3.4, see Permit declined reviews to be reinitiated · Issue #4789 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

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Hi @Vitaliy,
Thanks so much for the information. This gives us another reason to upgrade to 3.4!

We are using 3.4.0.3 and the option to restore a cancelled reviewer is still not working:
Uncancel_reviewer

Has a fix for this been developed? I’d like to know where the code was tweaked in the current version so that I can fix ti without going through another installation.

To fix my current need, I’ve just gone to the “review_assignments” table and changed the “1” in the “cancelled” field to “0”. That seems to have fixed it but is not someone that many users can do, I suspect.

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Thanks for the fix tip. It reinstated the reviewer but shows the review as submitted (with no files or recommendation)
But it’s a step in the right direction.

This error now appearing when we try to reinstate a reviewer. Is there a workaround other than modifying the db table? We are running 3.4.0.6.

I found a manual solution to reinstate a reviewer in OJS 3.2.1.4.
It is not very quick nor elegant, but it works and you do not need to code.

  1. In Users, search for the reviewer user that accidentally refused the review
  2. Edit the user and change the email into a false one, and change a little the name or surname of the person for recognition purposes.
  3. Create a new user with the correct email and data, the username should be a little different
  4. Assign this new user as the new reviewer in the submission
  5. Once the review is done, you might consider to merge users. (I did not try this step yet; I am not sure if the system could show two reviews of the same user or it could be like the meme spiderman pointing).

We will upgrade the OJS version to a one that still have technical support soon, but meanwhile I share this trick so maybe it can be useful to someone.