Unable to re-assign a reviewer for an unduly regret paper

[mendesrocha]

Hi!

A reviewer of our journal has incorrectly answer unavaiable for a review request. Actually, he is avaible for it, but he answerd that he was not. Now I cannot re-assigned the same paper for him.

Thus, as an Editor, I am not able to re-assign this paper to the same reviewer, so that he will be able to receive and evaluate the paper. When I try to select the reviewer, it says that he was already assigned, so there is no link to assign him the paper again.

Is there any way to outline this problem?

Thanks in advance for any help

Renato

[jmacgreg]

Hi Renato,

The workaround for this issue is to start another round of the review process, at which point you will be able to reassign the reviewer. The block you encounter is there to stop editors from assigning already-declined reviewers by mistake, but it should probably be somehow overrideable. I've added a feature request at http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4517 -- please feel free to CC yourself to that for further updates.

Cheers,
James

[biomat]

We've got the same problem - and it is an old problem. It's one of the OJS oopses that seemingly could take couple of hours of programmer's time to fix but it may well take the next couple of years to start getting to it. For now I seem to be able to fix this problem the following way:

1. I go to the journal MySQL database and find in Table "users" the "user_id" of the reviewer who erroneously declined the review (for example by matching the "email" record).

2. With this id I go to the Table "review_assignments" and find the "reviewer_id" equal to the above "user_id" and "article_id" equal to the article number (just in case the same reviewer having multiple assignment records), and change the value of record "declined" from "1" to "0".

After this change the declined review shows as accepted review and both the editor and reviewer can proceed with it as if the reviewer had actually accepted the assignment rather than rejected it. I cannot guarantee that something else is not getting messed up in the process, but so far this fix didn't cause any problems for us.

Best