Edit metadata after the “Submissions closed” date [RESOLVED]

[gabriela]

How can the authors make revisions (required by the reviewers/director) to their abstract, once the “Submissions closed” date has passed?
The “edit metadata” link is not visible to the authors after the “Submissions closed” date. The conference collects abstracts only.

Many thanks in advance,
Gabriela

[jmacgreg]

Hi Gabriela,

After the "submissions closed" date has passed, the Director should in fact be the only person to make changes to submissions, whether to metadata or the files themselves; the rationale being that after the submissions deadline, programs may start to be printed, etc., and that any changes should be introduced carefully.

In looking into this issue, I noticed that presenters can still upload revised files after submissions have closed; I talked to Alec about this, and he actually considers *that* behaviour a bug.

If Directors and/or Reviewers are still in a position where authors need to provide updated data/metadata, instructions should probably be spelled out by the director herself, when the request-for-revisions email is sent.

Cheers,
James

[jhannaford]

Hi James,

Based on the workflow that I have seen from conference organizers that I have been working with, I think it would in fact be very useful for authors to have the ability to edit their abstract after the submission date has ended.

The way the organizers I have been working with are approaching submissions is as follows:
- They accepted all abstracts up until the submission date passed.
- Now that the submission period has ended, they are reviewing all the submissions and where necessary, responding to the authors by indicating that the abstract 'requires revisions'
-The author then logins and gets stuck trying to respond to the request for revisions as they cannot edit their original metadata.

I think that this is likely to be a pretty typical way that conference organizers approach things. I can easily see the need for revisions occurring after submissions for the original abstract have closed. I'd welcome your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Julie

[jmacgreg]

Hi Julie,

Your reasoning actually makes a fair bit of sense to me. Basically, what you're saying is that the bulk of the editing/review process occurs between the submission close date and the start of the conference proper, am I correct? So, if the actual review timeline could be separated from the submission timeline, and the author editing functions grouped with that, we'd have something like what you're looking for.

I'll talk to Alec, and see whether behaviour like this could be incorporated or not.

Thanks,
James

[jmacgreg]

Hi Julie and Gabriela,

I posted a bug referencing this issue that you may want to keep an eye on:

http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3233

In addition, Alec says that, in the meantime, allowing metadata edits past the deadline should be a simple edit to classes/submission/presenter/PresenterAction.inc.php in the mayEditMetadata function.

Thanks,
James

[asmecher]

Hi all,

After mulling this over for a while, we've decided on the following approach:

• Editors who are also registered as authors will always be able to submit, i.e. the Submissions Close date has no effect on them.
• Authors will not be able to modify completed submissions (i.e. their metadata, files, etc.) after the Submissions Close date.
• Authors will be able to complete incomplete submissions (including their metadata, files, etc.) after the Submissions Close date, but as the submission will be completed after the closing date, it will be up to the Director to decide whether or not to consider the submission.
• After the Submissions Close date, Authors who want to make corrections will have to do so via the Director or Track Director assigned to the submission.
• One exception exists: if the last review decisions was a Revisions Required decision, the Author will still be able to edit metadata, upload revised files, etc. even if the Submissions Close date has passed.

Let me know if you have any feedback on this.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[jhannaford]

Hi there,

Thanks very much - I think what you propose will work really well for us!

[tshore]

My conference director has indicated that he has received between 50 and 100 corrections from authors and he is not looking forward to doing all of those corrections himself. I agree that you don't necessarily want people going in and changing a submission in the middle of the review process, however, I think that we can all agree that no conference organizer wants to be editing 100 submissions. Why not allow them to edit their submissions - there would be a log of activity kept, right? - up until they have been accepted and posted on the conference website?

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

I believe that Alec's breakdown will still allow for this -- especially the last point, which allows for submissions marked as "Revisions Required" to be edited after the Submissions Closed date has passed. If I'm missing a point here, please let me know.

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

I guess it's just that marking a submission as "Revisions Required" implies that the director feels that the academic content of the submission needs to be modified. Many - probably most - of the corrections my client has to deal with are superficial things such as typos and missing author affiliations. Also, marking a submission as "Revisions Required" means that the director would first have to get an email from the submitting author and then go into OCS in order to select this status. I think that most directors would prefer not to be involved at all in this process.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

I see what you mean. I think the concern we have right now is that any uninvited changes made by an author while the submission is in review might not be caught by the reviewer, or even the director. Specifically, while submission events can be logged, I don't believe either of those roles currently have access to the event log.

Do you know when, typically, these revisions are being requested by the authors? If it's a matter of allowing edits before the submission goes into review, I think it'd be a fairly trivial fix. If it's to allow for uninvited edits through the entire process up to completion, that might not be so trivial.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll most likely send in a bug report after you get back to me.
James

[tshore]

I think that most of the requests for corrections probably came shortly after the submission was received, so your suggestion that authors be allowed to login and make changes up until the submission was assigned for review sounds like a good one. It may seem a little random to authors however - I was able to make a correction one day, but not the next? But an appropriate error message should take care of that. This would also be something that would need to be documented for directors somewhere obvious, like maybe on the page where they are assigning submissions to reviewers.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

Many thanks for the additional details. I've posted this as a bug:

http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3420

If you have any further comments, feel free to post directly to the bug report.

Cheers,
James