Create new roles, and rename existing roles

[marie]

Our OJS-installation will be serving several journals, and one of the journals to be transfered to OJS, has been running for several years. They are not quite happy with the OJS-workflow as it is today, since they have their own way doing things.

Is it possible to:

1
Create new roles? The one role in particular they're missing, is co-editor. The co-editor will take over many of the editor's tasks.

I've read other threads where you advise against it, e.g. this one
http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4179

Can you give some more arguments why not?

2
Rename existing roles? This journal is a small one, and instead of "Section Editor", they prefer "Editorial Assistant". The tasks are very much the same, but will also include some editor's tasks and some copyediting and proofreading.

In connection with this question: is it possible to move tasks from one role to another role? If yes, is this described somewhere?

Regarding these two questions: it is important that changes made for one journal, don't affect the rest on our OJS-installation.

Thanks!

Marie

[jmacgreg]

Hi Marie,

Regarding Question 1: adding a new role is a nontrivial development excercise, to say the least; you'll have to make large changes to the underlying OJS codebase, and not just to the templates or locales. If you have development expertise in-house, give it a shot and we can help.

Question 2: You can use the Custom Locale plugin on a per-journal basis, I believe (I haven't actually used it myself, but from a quick look I'd say this is the case). This will allow you to change eg. Section Editor to Editorial Assistant for just that journal.

You can't move tasks around; but you can assign review to one SE only, and editing to another SE.

Cheers,
James

[SMPSYR]

Hello All,

I am the Journal Manager for two upcoming OA journals and this thread is relevant to me, although I haven't found any recent activity on the topic.

Both of my journal teams have independently requested the same user role adjustment in the default OJS submission-to-editing workflow, i.e., they want a role that will have full access to assigned submissions and support communication with the editor (but not the author) -- in order to suggest appropriate reviewers based on submission content, existing subject expertise in the reviewer pool and the field at large.

We looked at re-purposing section editor and reviewer for this role but there were issues with providing more permissions than would be necessary for the task. It is also our understanding that the reviewer role must accept the review assignment before they can view the entire work. Even if we could make that work, the Reviewer history would be inaccurate and could get confusing if we used it for two separate purposes. Also, since some of the "pre-reviewers" might also serve as actual reviewers at some point, the path through the system must accurately reflect the task at hand.

So, in short, is it possible to either create a new role or edit the permissions of an existing role to support the "pre-review-assignment review" I described above?

Thanks!
Suzanne