Misleading statistics following upload of back issues

[mgregson]

One of the journals we support migrated to OJS last year and uploaded all the back issues using the normal submit process. As a result the article statistics (/manager/statistics?statisticsYear=2012) are now somewhat misleading in numerous ways.

• All submissions are listed under 2012 not the year in which they were actually submitted
• As rejected submissions were not uploaded the acceptance rate is incorrect
• There is no peer-review milestone data so peer review statistics and Days to Review and Days to Publication are incorrect

I was thinking about various ways to try and fix the situation but all I could come up with was using SQL to modify the DB directly using historical records for each article in and rejected from the back issues, e.g., when submissions were received and when reviews were complete. Sounds very messy.

I wonder if a simpler solution would be a new feature that provides journal managers a field to specify a date before which statistics will not be shown. Accompanied by an appropriate message for the reader where the statistics are displayed, this seems like a neat way to avoid the problem for migrations to OJS.

Any thoughts?

Cheers
Mark