Sugestion: Acess to Author Base

[Charles.Vincent]

Hi,

Upon submiting an Abstract or Full Paper, frequently a user has to add one or more Authors...
What if the first author (the one who is submitting) could find on the users database the other authors to add, instead of filling in data for each one.

If the Author is to fill data into "Add author" fields, on the other hand, this data should be fed into the database as an inscription for that new author...
The system could then generate a random username and password and automatically send them to the newly created user.

Charles

[jmacgreg]

Hi Charles,

An interesting set of feature requests, and one that has already been slightly touched on before IIRC (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4211&p=16326#p16326). Since the author information entered during submission does not necessarily have to be connected to any Author-user (it's simply treated as submission metadata -- same with the primary author information, which the submitting Author can change if submitting on behalf of someone else), I'm hesitant to agree that the submission metadata page would be a good place to sign up new authors ... but maybe it's not a bad idea.

MJ Suhonos is doing some work integrating Lemon8 into OJS, and I believe that automatic metadata extraction similar to this is on the plate. I'll ask him to respond more fully to this thread, and suggest whether any of this can be fashioned into a full feature request right now or if it's better to wait.

Cheers,
James

[mj]

Hi Charles,

Just to follow-up on James' comment, and perhaps speak more directly to the kind of functionality you're describing, would it be reasonable to suggest a function wherein, when editing an article's metadata (either in submission or editing), an author/editor could search the system for additional authors based on email address (as suggested in the thread James references)? This would provide limited access to the user database, but in instances where: a) the submitting author knows the email addresses of additional authors; and b) those authors are registered in the OJS system under the same email addresses, it would simplify editing somewhat.

I should also add that the issue of managing author metadata, and unique identity / name authority, is a much larger and very common problem in the world of scholarly publishing in general -- and there are a number of efforts underway by various publishers and organizations to attempt to address via author IDs, etc. Martin Fenner has some interesting discussion of these on his blog (http://network.nature.com/tags/authorid), although I can't see us supporting author IDs within OJS any time in the near future, at least until they're well-established and many of the existing concerns have been addressed.

Hope this helps,
MJ