Our journal has sometimes special issues. As an editor I do receive a notification of new submissions. But at the Submissions overview page in OJS it does not appear that a submission is for a specific special issue.
To make clear to the editor that a submission is made for a special issue we ask the authors in the “Submission Preparation Checklist” to tell for which special issue the article has been sent in the “Comments for the Editor” window. It then appears under “Pre-review discussions”.
As an editor it would be of great help if you could see immediately at the submission overview page that a submission is made for a specific special issue.
If there is no way to arrange this then it would also be useful to sent a notification to the editor that the author has sent “Comments for the Editor”. Even better when the “Comments” appear inside of the notification to the editor. Does someone has a solution for this?
A lot of journals create a section for the special issue and ask authors to submit to that section. Then when you are looking at the submission list you can filter by section to just see submissions to the special issue.
Another option is to create a separate journal for the special issue. More information is available in this forum post.
Best regards,
Amanda Stevens
Public Knowledge Project Team
Hi @astevens!
I have a follow up question about this workflow! We just migrated a journal of OJS 2 to OJS 3 and historically–they’ve used the “sections” approach for their special issues. However, they’ve had a lot of special issues! Because of this…it is making for some clunky UX in the journal editor/manager dashboard. Specifically, when the filters are used in the submission tab…there are ~40 sections that continue on for a very long scroll.
What about if right before the issue is published the journal editor moves the articles into more general sections and then deletes the special issue section? I think this would work unless the special issue section is used to display the published content. But I expect that instead the special issue issue is used to distinguish the content and it would be better to have the articles in other sections. Would that work?
Another question related to this topic: our special issues often may include submissions of different types (e.g. case studies, field reports, articles) which we would normally handle by assigning them to sections. If we use the “section” method for identifying special issues, it makes it impossible to identify those other kinds of genres within a special issue. It would be really nice if OJS had a separate mechanism for tracking special issues.
I created a Github issue for this feature request since it looks like a lot of OJS users want it! Please add your comments. You just need to create a free Github account in order to comment on issues or create new issues.
