We are backtracking from OJS3 to OJS2 and will look for other submission system

This is to notify the people in PKP that we are forced to backtrack from OJS 3 and use instead of our old OJS 2.
Some of the reasons:

  1. No article id is displayed.
  2. Coauthors are not copied in emails.
  3. There is no clarity that emails are actually sent. Apparently, authors only receive notifications and not proper emails.
  4. When inside a submission, you lose sight of the article section that manuscript was submitted to.
  5. The system does not id uploaded files.
  6. Authors cannot upload more files after submission (possible and desirable in OJS2).
  7. No unsubmit option.
  8. No send to draft option.
  9. When creating a user, no confirmation that user was actually created.
  10. And a long list of horrible, horrible problems.

I posted at least two requested features and no answer from PKP.

Hi @Vivienne_Bachelet_No,

  1. See ID of article in Workflow page - #9 by budhi.
  2. What version of OJS are you using? Is there a particular email that you’re discussing?
  3. I think this relates to How to send email to all authors of a submission in OJS 3.1.0.1? - #9 by asmecher
  4. If you have a proposal for where this information should be exposed, please post it as a new topic in the forum, along the lines of the thread linked in 1.
  5. Can you describe this further?
  6. Please post your version of OJS; the ability of authors to upload files will depend on what version of OJS you’re using.
  7. I don’t believe there was an unsubmit in OJS 2.x either. The workflow we recommend, so nobody is surprised by the sudden disappearance of an article, is for the author to contact the editor (e.g. via Discussions) to request that a submission be revoked; the editor can then archive the submission.
  8. This option didn’t exist in OJS 2.x either and I don’t believe we’ve received a feature request for it. We do have some concepts for broadly improving email composition/sending, and this might be something we can integrate into it.
  9. This may already be resolved – what version of OJS are you using?
  10. This is free software, and we depend on the community to help us develop and improve it. Please be constructive, and we will do what we can to incorporate your requests.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3 Likes

Within the limits of my frustration, I will try to be as constructive as possible.

  1. On article id. This is a requested feature by another OJS user that I hooked on to. What is frustrating is that OJS2 was brilliant on this–you always had the id number in sight, no matter where you where in the workflow (99%). So value was lost because, as you correctly state somewhere, as editors we are not programmers (“I understand that many groups don’t have developer expertise”).

  2. Our installed version is 3.1.1.4. On the sending emails to all coauthors, I have not been able to find any option to copy all coauthors in the correspondence to the corresponding author. This was automatic in OJS2. Now we cannot do it. Sending copies of emails to all authors is now best practice in journals.

  3. No, it is not related to How to send email to all authors of a submission in OJS 3.1.0.1?. To clarify the point, in OJS2, when you send emails, you can send a copy to yourself, or you can CC others, then the email is sent, it is logged into the system and it is sent as an actual email to the recipient. Now, apart from the log, now called editorial history, you can’t really be sure what came out, and it turns out that a notification is sent…This is a loss of value compared to OJS2.

  4. My proposal would be to keep the logic of OJS2, as shown here:
    Screenshot_2019-03-04%20%231538%20Review

  5. See figure.
    Screenshot_2019-03-04%20%231538%20Review-1

  6. Our version is 3.1.1.4

  7. No, there wasn’t. I requested the feature in 2015 Author should be able to complete submission or editor unsubmit or return to draft I was hoping that in a full upgrade of OJS this would have been included.

  8. Sending to draft is the same as unsubmit. Very helpful when authors send incomplete submissions without having to decline, or reject.

  9. My editorial assistant pointed this one out to me. She feels insecure that notifications have actually been sent. We have found more user problems but couldn’t list them all…

  10. The problem here is that OJS 3 has some nice things to it–better look and feel, great to switch between languages, some better user experiences. What is frustrating is that many good things from OJS 2 are gone and we don’t understand why.

If your’s is a small team, mine is probably even smaller.

And thank you for replying promptly.

Regards,

Vivienne

Hi there, may I add something. Our journal has one Journal editor and six section editors. One thing that really frustrates me, is that I no longer have a birds-eye view of all the manuscripts assigned to the various section editors. I need to log into the profile of each section editor to see what the status of submissions are and how many submissions are still open. This takes a long time. I want more info on the “all submissions” page, at least, such as who the section editor is.

1 Like

Hi @pvrcr,

The “All Submissions” list is absolutely intended to be the bird’s-eye view, and it’s tricky to find the right balance of information.

One frequent criticism of OJS 2.x is that it resembled an airplane cockpit – over the years we tended to add more and more information, and it was often overwhelming. For OJS 3.x we generally responded to that by presenting information much more sparsely, but have been making use of much more modern front-end tools to allow users to examine listings to get more detail.

Adding section editor information to the submission list is a frequent request, and a planned improvement. See e.g. [Sprint/UIUX] Improve the Submission Dashboard · Issue #4099 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub and Add filtering options to new submissions list · Issue #2612 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like

That would be a great help to us, thanks Alex!