Superflous codes before affiliations - a:1:{s:5:"en_US";s:22:"

Software Support
1

Can anyone explain why the code a:1:{s:5:“en_US”;s:22:" appears on most of my articles before one of the author names - see e.g. Energy System Optimization including Carbon-Negative Technologies for a High-Density Mixed-Use Development | International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management

And any idea as to how to avoid it - without the editor having to manually delete it?

OJS 3.2.1.3

Regards
Poul

2

Hi @poulalberg

That’s serialized PHP. Without knowing the history of the installation it’s hard to say for sure, but it’s possible this is the result of an upgrade that had problems, or some direct database editing. You’d be able to tell by looking in the author_settings table. Your specific example is related to the affiliation field. It’s fixable, probably with some scripting (make a backup of the database first).

Cheers,
Jason

3

Hi,
For the last few days, I am noticing the same strange code as well. Particularly, it is happening with the new submissions and specifically, it is appearing with the primary author affiliation.
OJS: 3.3.0.6
Thanks

4

Hi,

Has anything happened to the installation? This shouldn’t just start to happen on its own. It would require a code modification to insert serialized PHP into an author_settings “setting_value” field, as opposed to a string of text.

Cheers,
Jason

5

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately I am merely the editor-in-chief of the journal - and our university library is in charge of the installation, so I will try to forward your suggestions to them. When I initially googled the term, it resulted in many other instances from various journals - so I’m not the only one experiencing this one…

Regards, Poul

6

After updating OJS (from 3.1.2.1 to 3.3.0.8) I was having the same issue. I noticed that relatively small number of rows (~50) was affected for – at least in my case – mostly declined or incomplete submissions, so I manually edited out those of published.

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