Moving from Round 1 to 2 - no access to Round 1 information

[phil]

Dear OJS Team;

Senario:

1. Author is required to Resubmit for Review (this will trigger Round 2). The author is also required to provide a supplementary file with comments that directly address the concerns of Round 1 Reviewers. Total files on resubmission = at least 2 files.

2. The Editor resubmits the revised article to Round 2 of peer review. However, he can only select one file to forward to the next round. Not two.

3. The Editors considers it important (read insist) that the original round 1 reviewer also review the revised article AND that the reviewer have access to his/her original review (either in the form or an uploaded doc) AND ideally also have access to the originally submitted article (for comparative purposes).

The problems therefore that are being brought to my attention are:

- only 1 file moved into the second round of review, depriving reviewer of author's direct response
- no access of the round 2 reviewer(s) to their original review or to the original article

I'm wondering if there is a solution - or practical work around - to any of these issues. I'm also wondering if, amongst other journals managers, if this a shared problem and what approaches have been taken to it.

Thanks,

/phil

[phil]

Dear PKPSupport Team;

I'm wondering if any of you can offer any words of wisdom or advice regarding working (around) with this issue?

Thank you very much,

/phil

[jmacgreg]

Hi Phil,

Hrm. I can see a couple of workarounds:

1. Insist that any changes be tracked in the same document with Track Changes (I believe most document suites support this kind of functionality). You'll have the one progressively-reviewed file that will contain a history of all revisions in it, and the system will also contain a history of uploaded files, which could conceivably help if a dispute crops up. However, I'm no Track Changes expert, and I'm unsure how far you can push it (ie. how many rounds of review) before the feature starts to seriously impact readability.

2. "Attach" the old revision to the end of the new by copy&paste, so that the one doc contains both revisions. This would be a pretty clunky workaround.

I haven't seen any requests for this kind of access before from other Editors, but if other think it might be a good use case, I'm sure we'd be happy to consider it as a feature request.

Cheers,
James

[aleskl]

I recently encountered the same problem as Phil above.

The usual review process in our journal is that authors submit a revisioned version (after review round 1) and separate detailed step-by-step explanations what was corrected or not according to the review. Using track changes or comments for explanations is not an option, because that would introduce text into the manuscript that will not be a part of the paper and would only confuse things. Plus, some of our authors do not work in Word, so they don't have this option (they work eg. in LaTeX).

So now we have one paper in the second round of review, where the authors submitted a revised version of the paper and two additional files with comments for each of the two reviewers. What is the best way now to invite the same reviewers for the second round of review and pass them the author comments? Should we copy & paste the text from the additional file into the email that will be sent to the reviewer?

For future papers, what is the best way for authors to submit their responses to the reviewers in the second round? Can this be done automatically authors to reviewers, or the should be passed on the reviewers by the editor?

Cheers,
Ales

[jmacgreg]

Hi Ales,

This is a somewhat tricky workflow, but I think it's probably common enough that we should have a better way to address it. I believe we usually suggest that any detailed correspondence from author to reviewer be attached to the revised document itself (for example, as additional attached pages); or attach the revisions as a supplementary file (though care will have to be taken that this file isn't subsequently published along with the completed submission, which can conceivably be the case if you have configured OJS to publish supplementary files, and if your layout manager doesn't delete the supplementary file during the layout editing process).

In the meantime, I've filed a feature request here. Please feel free to CC yourself to that report for future updates, and also add any further comments as you see fit. As I mentioned in that report, I do believe that this kind of functionality is or will be present in OMP, and so it's probably just a matter of time before it is available for OJS. But it's still worth adding as a request.

Cheers,
James