I have question concerning the Review Stage in OJS 3.3.0-4:
after Reviews have been completed by the Reviewers, the Editor can decide to “Request Revisions” of the Authors instead of sending the Submission into the Copyediting stage. When doing so, the Editor can add the Review to the email by pressing the “add Review to Email” Button:
My Question: Is this (via Email) the only way to inform Authors about the content of the Review in OJS 3.3? Or are there other ways to show the Review to the Authors, within the system?
You can also attach the review files to the email notification to the author, always making sure they fit the review format the journal works with (open, blind, double-blind), or you could upload a new file and attach it to the email.
An alternative to this is opening a discussion and sending it to the author with a message body and attached files, this will stay on the submission’s page, it won’t be visible to reviewers, and also send an email notification to the author.
thank you for your swift reply! Unfortunately, the solutions you mentioned aren’t applicable to our situation, but we were able to fix it ourselves in the meantime by using the standard way of sending emails and changing up the ui in our system.
Hi Max 358, could you explain in more detail how you change the UI in your system? We want to add only the “Comment to Authors” part from the review form to the Editor’s email. Maybe your experience will guide us.
I am working together with @Max358 . I hope I understand you correctly, if not please come back to me :).
What we wanted to do
We wanted to ensure that the decision email from the editors to the authors always includes the comments (as well as all files). In OJS 3.3.0.7 it is possible by manually clicking the ‘include comments’ button which then modifies the template selected. Whenever the template changes, it will be removed again.
Solution
Instead of modifying OJS/pkp-lib core functionality we decided to go another way which turns out to be quite nice. We include an additional jQuery script which observes the browsers DOM and try to find out when the HTML form with the id #sendReviews is loaded. If so, we auto-click the ‘append comments’ checkbox (then hide it and show a note) and repeat this process in case the user changes the template (we also auto-check all attachments).
Advantage
No need for patching the core system; should not break the system. It simply modifies the clients DOM on his/her local browser. Simpler to maintain from our side.
