Hi. I have a client whose issues are so distinct each volume that they use different reviewers each time.
For this reason she would like to be able to contact a set of reviewers based on only one issue.
They have 275 reviewers but for any current issue maybe only 25.
Is this possible? I believe the same would be interesting for “authors”, not all registered authors, but to be able to send an email to authors who have an actual publication in the system
Is there an easy solution if not?
Hi @jamiefowlie,
I presume you’re using OJS; what version?
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
2.4.6.0 (September 25, 2015 - 01:46 PM)
Hi @jamiefowlie,
Off the top of my head, the quickest route to what you describe might be via the reports, which can be extracted in CSV format and imported into a spreadsheet. You could in turn use a mail merge to send a message to users listed there. That’s not a particularly beautiful work-around, I’m afraid. It’s a fairly specific requirement so I don’t think it would be of general use as a feature in the software.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Okay, that’s not a bad approach. If reports allowed us to visualize assigned referrees, it might work. I have a feeling this is basically an extraction of all reviewers, and then someone has to cull the specific ones. Ill look into it.
I disagree though about it being a fairly specific requirement. It seems to me there are different types of journals. Surely there are many that dedicate issues to specific themes or approaches or topics, and these types of journals cannot simply rely on a small set of reviewers, but rather, need to ensure the reviewers are experts in the field appropriate to each issue. I’m thinking here for example of a Law Journal or a Sports Journal, or an Educational journal, all of which have so many sub-disciplines that the reviewers are constantly changing. What I was thinking is that in the area where we want to send a mass mailing out to “all reviewers” that we might have a chance to filter out those assigned to a particular issue. But I don’t know how, for example, the database is set up to distinguish between a “reviewer” and one who has actually done a review, and if that review is linked permanently through say, Issue ID. Maybe being able to categorise reviewers so that editors could draw from a reduced pool based on interest/expertise (Language experts vs. Literary scholars versus Culture/History experts - for example in most modern language journals) would then enable sending out emails appropriate to a sub group of reviewers. Just some thoughts!
Thanks for the reply, Ill see what I can do.
Hi @jamiefowlie,
There are definitely journals out there doing what you’re doing – but a relatively small subset of our community, and we’re constantly trying to keep the user interface from ballooning out of control thanks to small variations on functionality. One way of avoiding this situation is to encourage users to work with plugins, so that more specific requirements can be implemented and distributed separately from the main OJS codebase – this, I think is one of those situations. Report plugins, for example, are all implemented as plugins, so if extracting users via a report is a useful starting point it may be possible for you to put together a report plugin based on one of the existing ones but e.g. restricting exported data to a specific issue.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team