Request revisions email form not working for some Section Editors

Hi,

We are using OJS 3.3.0.14, recently upgraded from 3.0.2.0.

In the ‘review’ section for a submission, as an adminsitrator, when I click the ‘request revisions’ button, I get the following email form, with the correct email text and the 'add reviews to email button:

However, the Section Editor sees the following form. They seem to have the wrong email text, with the placeholders not processed, and they do not see the ‘add reveiws to email’ button:

When they choose different options from the drop down box at the top of the screenshot the email template does not change.

I logged in as a few different section editor on other submissions and some seem to see this issue and others see the correct email template with the option to add the reviews.

I am hoping that someone more familiar with OJS than me will be able to point me in the right direction to resolve the issue that some Section Editors seem to be having of not being able to add reviews.

Thank you!

Hi @ayeaye,

I wonder if the reason why some section editors see this and some don’t is because some of the section editors who have different options available to them also have other roles (e.g. Editors or Journal Managers?) Can you look to confirm if this is the case?

-Roger
PKP Team

Hi Roger,
Many thanks for your reply. I had already considered the access levels possibly being the cause. Some of the Section Editors are also set as Reviewers, Readers and Authors and others were only Section Editors. But these differences don’t correlate with the issue and adjusting them didn’t make any difference.

However, I’ve been looking at the issue more and have realised that actually I think I have two different problems here.

In the cases where the Section Editors are able to ‘request revisions’ and successfully add reveiws to the email as I’d expect, they see these buttons:
Screenshot 2023-10-11 161523

Wheras in the cases where they are not able to add reviews and have missing email template placeholders, I have realised that they are actually clicking a different button, this one:

So the issues seem to be:

  1. Some Section Editors can only recommend a decision and can’t contact the author regarding the review or request revisions.
  2. The email template for recommend decision email has broken placeholders.

It seems to be newer submissions that have the problems, not the older ones, so perhaps is being caused by upgrade.

I hope this makes sense if you can shed any further light that would be great, thanks again for you time.

Jen

Hi @ayeaye,

Thanks for the further explanation. What i suspect might be happening here is the settings in Users and Roles - Roles (Select “Section editor” - and Edit), and you should see these options:

I suspect you might have the third option selected for the section editor role?

-Roger
PKP Team

Hi Roger,

Thanks for the suggestion, but alas we don’t have that option selected:

It seems strange that on some submissions the section editors can see the correct 3 buttons.

Thanks again for your help.

Jen

Hi @rcgillis,

I’ve just had another look at this, and realised that there is another place that the section editors can be set to ‘recommend only’ and that is when the section editor is assigned to the submission:

So that solves that mystery!

However, we are still left with the issue that for those who have are only be able to Make Recommendations, the email form to notify the main editor still seems to have broken placeholders:

As you can see the Editor name is missing at the top of the email body, and the ‘RECOMMENDATION’ placeholder does not seem to be replaced.

Thanks for your help,
Jen

Hi @ayeaye,

I’m curious if you might try sending this recommendation email (even with those shortcomings) as a test email and dummy submission within your system and see how it displays within the workflow?

-Roger
PKP Team