An author of ours (langsci-press.org) started the submission process for a new manuscript in OMP. He filled in all the fields on the first page of the wizard and got the following message: “Select the role that best describes your contribution to this submission.” but there was no selection drop down dialogue or similar
It turns out that this user had not ticked the roles “author” nor “editor” in his user profile. Giving him the role “author” allowed the user to complete the submission process.
Prompting a user to select a role when no roles to select from are being offered is confusing.
I see a couple of possible remedies:
- prevent users without a suitable role from launching the submission wizard in the first place. Display appropriate information telling users that they have to get the relevant role first.
- allow users without a suitable role to start the wizard, but give an error message “you have no appropriate role” with useful information about how to obtain such a role.
I would conjecture that the error message is triggered by length(user.suitableRoles)!=1 when it should be length(user.suitableRoles)>1 to avoid being triggered by a length of zero (the above is obviously mumbo jumbo code, not PHP, but you should get the idea)
