Workflow customisation

Software Support
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Hi All,

we intend to use OJS in education (scientific writing), in order to provide a realistic workflow and platform to the students. However, the workflow we experience in our current test-instance using ojs3 is much to complex for a rather „simple“ student course. We simply want the students to submit their papers, automatically notify the teacher (journal manager) which should be the reviewer at the same time, and after some iterations on different reviews, the paper should be accepted (or not) and then automatically published. Thus, the lectors and publishing steps are not necessary in such a simplified setup.

We are very new to ojs, and going through each administrative backend page, we unfortunately did not find any possibility to simplify the workflow accordingly.

Please, could anyone point us into the right direction? Is there a possibility to customise the workflow, even if we need to do some minor „hack“ inside the PHP backend? Is there a plug-in or a fork of ojs which provides a „simplified“ workflow? We are aware of the fact, that a professional installation will of course need all the steps available, but I hope that you all understand, that the numerous roles and steps necessary are to much for applying ojs in a educational course scenario. On the other hand, we are very interested in applying ojs here - so any guidance, tips, help, manuals, howtos and shared experience is highly appreciated!

We are using the latest stable version 3.3.0-8

Kind Regards
Joe

2

There is not a possibility to customise the workflow, but you can simplify the process.
You need at least editor, authors and reviewers.

  1. The author submits the article.
  2. The editor sends the article to the referees.
  3. Referees make evaluations.
  4. Publish accepted articles. For publication, of course, the numbers/issues must be generated.
3

Thanks a lot for your reply! Indeed, this was the process we tried, but the „number of clicks“ you need with this process using the implemented workflow, is quite high. Thus we thought simplifying the underlying workflow would help.

In the meantime, we found ops (open preprint system) might be a solution here - what does the community think? We don’t have any experience with this system too.