Reminders to reviewers are sent too early

Hi,
we are using OJS 2.4.6 and are having problems with the automatic reminders that are sent to reviewers after the due date for revision. We have set up the policies so that reviewers should receive reminders 5 days after the request if they have not taken action and 2 days after the due date (4 weeks time to review).
What happens is that reviewers receive the reminders early with respect to the due date.
Thank you
Best regards
Valeria

I’m confused if your reviewer are receiving the reminders too early (“receive the reminders early with respect to the due date”), or too late (“sent to reviewers after the due date”).

I will note however, that in OJS 2.4.6 there was great ambiguity with regard to the reminder to accept or decline a review invitation vs. the reminder to complete an accepted review. (The same message was used for both communications!) See:

This was resolved in 2.4.8, and may relate to your experience.

Thank you for your reply. Indeed the confusion with templates does not help but we have a problem also after the reviewer has accepted to review, in that he then receives reminders well before the due date for review has passed.
Any suggestion there?
Thank you
Best regards
Valeria

I think this is as expected. In 2.4.6, there is one reminder which may be sent one of two times:

In either case the reminder will be the same text.

In 2.4.8, this is improved, as the logic is the same, but the reminder text is specific to whether the review request is outstanding, or whether the review is overdue.

Thank you very much for your reply. We checked the system and everything seems to be fine.

Still this does not explain why one of the reviewers who was sent the request to review on September 14th, replied she was able to review the same day, received reminders starting September 15th (although she shouldn’t have) 5 times (the first one the day after, then other two every 8 days, and the last two after 2 and 6 days). Finally, two days after the due date for submitting the review had passed she started receiving a reminder every day (this time correctly as the system is set up this way).

Also, as an editor, I do not see that the is overdue for her review according to the colors that are normally assigned in the editor view (see screen shot below, manuscript ID 340, second from top).

I’m not particularly familiar with the review reminders, but my reading of the code is that only one reminder would ever be sent.

Your situation seems exceptional. I’m hoping someone else with more experience with the review reminders might be able to chime in.

Hi all,

Two possibilities come to mind:

  • Do you have any testing/development copies of your installation that might be sending out the duplicates?
  • Are you using the Acron plugin? If so, consider using a cron job instead on your server (see this issue for technical details)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi Alec,

thanks for the suggestions!

The e-mail log on the production server shows that all the early reminder e-mails are all being sent out of it. In any case we haven’t set up cron jobs on our development servers. It doesn’t look like the issue is there.

The Acron plugin seemed to be enabled. I just disabled it. We have a cron job running according to https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/docs/userguide/2.3.3/systemAdministartionScheduledTasks.html. Hopefully this makes a difference.

Thanks again for the suggestions and cheers,

Nikos

Hi @asmecher,

I’m reviving this old questions since we’re still having problems. We can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong and we don’t want to dive more into the PHP code (for fear of messing things up!). We’ll hopefully soon migrate our production system to OJS 3 which should straighten things out. Until then I was thinking about writing a short script that will send out custom reminders. For that I will directly read data from the database.

My question becomes: Does it suffice to read the review_assignments table to figure out who I should be sending reminders to? If yes, here are some quick follow up questions:

  • To know if a reviewer has accepted to review a given submission can I use column date_confirmed → if “NULL” it means they have not accepted yet?
  • To know if a reviewer has submitted their review can I use column date_completed → if “NULL” it means they have not submitted yet?

Should I be using different / extra columns and / or tables?
Does this approach exclude some corner cases?

Thank you very much!

Nikos

Hi @kasioumis,

What version of OJS are you using?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher, we’re running 2.4.6.0

Hi @kasioumis,

I would suggest upgrading to the latest OJS 2.4.x release, if possible – there have been some improvements to the review reminder code that may well have already addressed the issue.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher, thank you for the suggestion! Unfortunately we have some constraints at the moment that do not allow us to upgrade, so we’re looking for a quick “hack” for the review reminders. Would parsing the review_assignments table and the aforementioned columns suffice or should we dig deeper in other tables / code? Any advice would be very welcome! Thanks again, Nikos

Hi @kasioumis,

Your assessment of the review_assignments table above is correct, yes.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hi @asmecher, thanks a lot for the confirmation, much appreciated!