Automated email notifications from OJS

[rmichael]

I would like OJS to send me email notification for two events:

1/ Creation of new user accounts. We've enabled creation of author, reader, and review accounts in journal setup and occasionally see bogus/spam user creation; also, I'd like to know when new people join and pay some attention to them.

2/ The addition of supplementary files to an existing submission. We need to ask authors to upload source material after acceptance and this is a decent way of doing so; though, I'm open to suggestions.

I've turned on logging, but there doesn't seem to be anything built in to handle these specific cases. Should I use hooks, modifiy our installation, or ..? I'd like to do this as a combination of "quick and dirty" and "the best way".

Thanks,
Richard

[asmecher]

Hi David,

Hooks should be able to do this without too many headaches. There should be a hook called "UserDAO::insertUser" that's called whenever a user entry is inserted; you should be able to check whether this is a user self-registration (as opposed to, say, an Editor creating a Reviewer account) using the Request::getRequestedPage() and Request::getRequestedOp() functions, and if they check out, you should be able to send your JM (or whoever) a message. There's sample code for sending a simple email message based on an email template in e.g. the emailColleague function in pages/rt/RTHandler.inc.php.

Likewise, for new supplementary files, you can use the "SuppFileDAO::insertSuppFile" hook for supplementary file insertions. Again, you'll need to check that it's actually the author adding the file, rather than e.g. an Editor.

Both of these tasks can be done using a single generic plugin. If you do approach it this way, please consider posting the plugin to the forum, as it may be useful for other users.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[rmichael]

Hi Alec,

Both of these tasks can be done using a single generic plugin. If you do approach it this way, please consider posting the plugin to the forum, as it may be useful for other users.

Thanks for your comments, I'll try this. It seems like a good project for a first plugin attempt. (Aside, in another post, I just asked about soliciting reviewers from within OJS. That's probably a good candidate for a plugin too. If this works out, I'll go this route on that project as well.)

Regards,
Richard

[sharonhu]

Hello,

Our Journal is hosted on version 2.2.3 and our Systems department indicated customizing the email notification (e.g., notify when an account is created, new submission) and well as selective notification (e.g., only the manager receives these types of emails) is not easily implementable without affecting other journals hosted on the same server.

Does the newer version of OJS allows for easier email notification customization? If so, we have a better case for prioritizing the version upgrade.

Thank you,
Sharon

[jmacgreg]

Hi Sharon,

In both OJS 2.2.3 and 2.3+, journal managers can modify email templates on a per-journal basis by clicking the "Prepared Emails" link from their User Home page. They can en/disable most emails, and edit the email text itself. There have been significant enhancements to notifications in OJS 2.3+, however, including a user-configurable notification page. If you can give us more details on what kind of workflow you are looking for, I can suggest whether it may be posible.

Cheers,
James

[Garant]

Hi!
I've a bit another question: how to disable mail notifications? Or turn off them permanently?
Thank you!

[jmarth]

Hi,
My question/problem is strongly related to Garant's:

We've just moved to another server and upgraded to version 2.4.0.0. Unfortunately the system has sent out automated review reminder to people that have declined our review request and thus have been cancelled from the review process. However, we are not sure if this is due to our moving or if it might be a bug in the software.

Apart from that I am interested, too, in how to disable the automated notifications - why are there prepared eMails that can be disabled and some that can not? For our specific handling of the review process it would be very helpful to disable the reminders every now and then to not put unintended pressure on reviewers.

Looking forward to your appraisal.
Best,
Julia.

[aleskl]

Hi Richard and Alec!
Did you then manage to create a plugin for the above automatic email notifications? I'm very much interested in the auto notification for newly uploaded supplementary files, because we also use the workflow with authors submitting original material via supplementary files.

Regards, Ales

Hi Alec,

Both of these tasks can be done using a single generic plugin. If you do approach it this way, please consider posting the plugin to the forum, as it may be useful for other users.

Thanks for your comments, I'll try this. It seems like a good project for a first plugin attempt. (Aside, in another post, I just asked about soliciting reviewers from within OJS. That's probably a good candidate for a plugin too. If this works out, I'll go this route on that project as well.)

Regards,
Richard