Statistics for Reviews requested and received as part of Editorial Stats

Feature Requests
1

Describe the problem you would like to solve
Currently, the aggregation of statistics to comply with “Plan S” is manually demanding, because two required KPIs are missing: “Number of reviews requested” and “Number of reviews received”.

Describe the solution you’d like
Extending the OJS Statistic Page and API Results for both KPIs. Providing them would easier compliance to Plan S requirements and also benefit the overall overview about a journal.

Who is asking for this feature?
(European) Journal Managers as well as Publishers/Publication Service Providers benefit from this feature when trying to achieve compliance with Plan S, which is supported by European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC).

Additional information
Relevant Description within Plan S:

“The journal/platform must provide, on its website, a detailed description of its editorial policies and decision-making processes. In addition, at least basic statistics must be published annually, covering in particular the number of submissions, the number of reviews requested, the number of reviews received, the approval rate, and the average time between submission and publication.”

Plan S: https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/principles-and-implementation/

2

I have no more votes, but this is an old requirement in our region too.

If I recall well, we had conversations about this in gitHub and some PKP fellows suggested use third party services.

I’m against this idea. The service need to be autonomous and we need to avoid feeding third party private-projects with metadata if possible.

3

I think It really depends on what you want to achive with statistics, if it might be usefull to use an external system for analytics (There are Open Source Solutions for that as well, Alec presented some Use Cases for MetaBase, Apache Superset is also quite interesting).

In my mind, OJS should provide at least those statistics, which are specific for an individual journal and are commonly requested. For more complex calculations, there are many “What-if” scenarios, that make the calculation more complicated and individual.

In the next step, my Idea would be to take these provided KPIs and put them as yearly aggregate on a public page in the frontend (by plugin?) so that the editors can comply with the requirements of Plan S regarding statistics with zero manual recurring effort.

1 Like
4

No need to convince me. I’m in. :wink:

Although I’m not a big fan of Plan S, there are common indicator shared between most usual “quality indicators” so make sense if OJS can offer those common ones.

BTW, the “Diamond Open Access Standard” (from EU but now moving to international with ALMASI where PKP is involved) is also a good place to find KPIs.

Unofficially, with this in mind, there is a university here that is creating a plugin for ojs 3.4 or greater to:

  • expand the OJS API (or create an alternative one).
  • use a template system to process the output and offer results it in different formats.

It will allow the creation of pages like the one you asked, but much more.

Project needs to be finished before the end of the year.
If you are interested I can keep you updated.

2 Likes
5

Yes, I am very interested. Would like to test this in 3.5 once available :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

BTW Sebastian… apart of “# reviews requested”, and “# reviews recived”, do you have more KPIs in mind?

7

Currently, they would help to fullfill the requirements of Plan S, so that would be a good minimal solution. However, we are keen to increase overall transparency where possible. If input is needed, I will ask my colleagues from our bibliometrics team, which additional metrics are perceived as usefull