Our Section Editors need to see the content of the Comments to the Editor, however, unless the system is setup to auto-assign them at the point of submission, this is not possible.
For a journal that has a senior or desk editor assess a new submission before assigning it to a Section Editor, the fact that the Section Editor isn’t assigned at submission means that they are unable to view the Comments from the author. As these may include important information about article or review process, this is causing some problems.
Describe the solution you’d like
Allow Section Editors permission to see the Comments to the Editor discussion once they have been assigned to the submission.
Who is asking for this feature?
Section Editors, Editors & Journal Managers
Thank you for confirming that you are also having this issue @TimW, and for explaining it more clearly than I did.
@rcgillis Please can this be escalated to a bug rather than a feature request. It can cause serious issues for a journal. We weren’t aware for months that the Editors being assigned to the submissions couldn’t see the ‘Comments for Editors’. Authors were using this box to write important notes like giving the details of ‘non-objective potential reviewers’, which of course were not seen by the Section Editors.
Luckily now that we are aware of this the Journal manager knows to add the Section Editor to the Comments for Editors discussion after assigning the article to them. However I wonder how many people aren’t aware of the problem at all until something important is missed.
The feature is currently working as designed, since we’re now using a discussion for recording and presenting the comments to the editor. Section editors who are assigned after the submission first come in shouldn’t gain retrospective access to discussions that were created beforehand – it would “break the model” and potentially involve them in conversations they shouldn’t be in.
I agree that this is a quirk that would be good to resolve, but in order to do that, we’d need to establish a new place for Comments to the Editor to live and code it out. So I’d consider this a feature request, and in the meantime, adding section editors to the “notes to the editor” discussion manually is a work-around.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Thanks for this, I can see that this makes sense for a journal were the submissions are being auto assigned. However, where they are being manually assigned it’s so easily missed that you have to do this extra step of adding them to the ‘comments for editors’ conversation. Particularly if you are assigning them directly from the list of submissions ‘Assign Editor’ link which is a pop-up window, where you don’t even see if the comments for editors discussion exists or not (just as another example of how people might get caught out by this):
I don’t think it needs a whole reworking though, it’s fine as a discussion. I wonder if there could be a check at the point of manually assigning an editor, where only if there is no other editor already assigned then they are auto added to that conversation. Or perhaps a tickbox ‘Add to Comments for Editors discussion’ in the ‘Assign Editor’ window. Either way would avoid the issue that you mentioned of people getting retrospective access.
Just a note that this has been raised independently across a few of our journals in the past month. When a new submission is (manually) assigned to a section editor, the assigning editor is assuming that all assignees will see the cover letter, as it is central to the submission data.
@asmecher do you think that it is possible to retrospectively add permission to view the Comments to the Editor automatically during the editor assignment process? We could potentially add this to our own roadmap if there is a way to implement it.
The challenge will be in finding a reliable way to identify which discussions were created due to the comments to the editor form being filled out. I suppose you could use a heuristic e.g. to correlate the time/date of the discussion creation against the moment the submission was finalized, but a little research would be needed to ensure that it would be accurate.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
