One of my journals had more than 100 failed / unprocessed submissions, which ended up exaggerating the submission IDs of the published articles.
I have deleted the incomplete submissions including those in the Archive.
My question is that after completely deleting such submissions, is there a way of reusing their ID numbers for subsequent genuine submissions?
For instance, the current submission of the 100th article has 495 as its ID. At this rate, the numbers could go to thousands.
The IDs aren’t intended for interpretation as anything but unique numbers for each submission. They’re generated by MySQL (or PostgreSQL), and if you’d like to rearrange them, you’ll need to work with the database directly – but I don’t recommend it. It’ll be a lot of work and prone to mistakes.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team