hiding information on reviewers

[stephanehess]

Hi,

we have two editors who are also journal managers (I'm one of them), along with several section editors. I have noticed that even when a paper is handled by a different editor, I can retrieve the identity of the reviewers. This is a small problem when the paper only involves other people as authors (still, the identities of the reviewers should only be known to the editor in charge), but becomes a major problem if one of the editors is an author. I.e. suppose I submit a paper as author, and a different editor handles the review process. If I log in as editor, would I be able to retrieve the identities of the reviewers? This would be a major problem.

Thanks

Stephane

[stephanehess]

this seems to have generate a lot of interest judging by the number of views, but no response. We recently had another case of an editor (not section editor) submitting a paper and it again needed to be handled offline. Any thoughts on this yet?

[jmacgreg]

Hi Stephane,

Apologies for not replying ... errr, 8 months earlier. I think the current solution would be to (at least temporarily) bump your Editor down to Section Editor, and to have any conflicting Editors bumped correspondingly. Currently, anyone at the Editor (or Journal Manager) level can -- and should -- have access to any article information in the system, and I don't think we'll be developing a way to work around this in the near future.

Cheers,
James

[stephanehess]

James,

thanks. That's what I thought you might say. Unfortunately the editor in question is me and I am also in charge of assigning papers to associate editors. I'll continue having my papers handled offline by one of the associates then

Cheers

Stephane

[biomat]

Stephane,

If you're only the editor (as opposed to the administrator) your solution may be in creating (by the administrator) a dummy sister-review-journal for these conflict of interest reviews, to which you would not have the access. See how I use a 'dummy journal' to provide an open public double-blind referring system with anonymous editors, authors, and referees (see http://mcfns.com/index.php/Blind) for the actual journal at mcfns.com where everything becomes transparent.

In this kind of scenario you would submit your manuscript to your main journal but an editor in charge of the manuscript would copy it for the review processing into the sister-journal, to which you would not have the access while he or she would - it takes just a few minutes to move a submission between two journals. You could even have a few 'sister-journals' if you had a few editors. I have a separate installation of OJS system for administrating reviews for a journal that does not use the OJS software at all, and I am just temporarily the EiC for it in addition to having my own OJS based journal.

Of course, if you are the system administrator, or even worse if you are the server administrator who have the access to the MySQL installation, then there is no other way than finding another system administrator working on another server who would make an independent OJS installation - there is nothing the OJS programmers could do to prevent a system administrator from finding all the data in the database. A good reason for having 'mirror sites' is testing new ideas relating to your journal changes and backups - I have a few of those and consider them very useful (e.g., main.mcfns.com and quantfor.com).

Best regards,