User Profiles in Multi-Journal Installations

[justingonder]

California Digital Library is hosting 40+ journals in a single installation. One set of problems we're running up against involves user profiles. I'll outline some of the specific issues we've encountered so far in the hopes that we might be able to consider solutions:

• When a single user is enrolled in more than one journal, it seems only that user (or perhaps a site admin) can make changes to that user's profile. This is problematic in our situation because an editor really needs to have the ability to edit information about their own journal's users.
• Some user details (e.g. reviewing interests, bio statement) need to be silo-ized and modifiable on a per-journal basis to prevent editors from a) seeing undesired or irrelevant data entered by another journal's editor b) modifying data that is important to an editor of a different journal
• Section editors can create new reviewer users, but once created they cannot make any edits to user profiles. This presents two problems: a) if the section editor makes a small error, they have no way of correcting it b) Journal Managers now have to give Journal Manager (top-level) permissions to anyone who they want maintaining their reviewer database (in our previous system, the ability to maintain the reviewer database was the lowest level of permissions among editors). (I discovered a partial solution to this particular issue at http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4632)

-justin gonder
eScholarship Operations Coordinator
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President
510.987.9869
help@escholarship.org