The sixth and final sprint summary from the PKP Minnesota Sprint, hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries in May 2024, is now available.
Sprints involve PKP community members joining diverse groups to work on PKP software and support. The University of Minnesota Libraries hosted six working groups at the PKP Minnesota Sprint in May. This is a summary of one such group’s work.
Discussion Workflow Group Abstract
Discussion workflow is an important topic for developing PKP scholarly publishing software because there are several places where discussions can get lost, which can complicate workflows, and ultimately, effective publication. Usability and transparency require discussion workflow development to enhance these areas. This group brainstormed creating discussion forums so that they would be easier to reply to and connect to emails than in the past. Discussion workflow brainstorming included task creation scoping and email notifications and discussions. The resulting templates will hopefully influence new and improved features for journal workflows.
Working Group Members
- Devika Goel, Public Knowledge Project (PKP)
- Shivangi Vashistha, PKP
- Christy Karpinski, Atla
- Laureen Boutang, University of Minnesota Libraries
Background
The group brought together past ideas for centering brainstorming around five main areas of discussion workflow improvements. These five areas were: (1) enhancing discussions and making discussion replies easier, (2) connecting emails and discussions, (3) understanding usability, (4) including all participants, and (5) developing notifications around how to do them better, which ones are relevant to whom, and linking context as well as help text.
Goals
- Develop a system that allows editors to create, assign, and manage tasks with flexible deadlines and visibility.
- Improve email notifications to include essential information and ensure efficient management of discussion replies.
Results
The resulting group work involved brainstorming and potential steps around task creation scoping, including the submission stage, task management and configuration, task assignments and discussions, task completion, and deadlines.
The group also came up with several possibilities to consider to improve the workflow beyond task creation scoping. These ideas ranged from improving email content to improving integration between discussion and email channels.
Tasks creation scoping
1. Submission stage: Pre-publication tasks
- Plagiarism check, ethical approval (e.g., disclosures), authorship criteria, adherence to policies and guidelines, language review, and preparation of files for anonymous review.
2. Task management and configuration brainstorming
- Editors can determine tasks based on the journal’s policies through the workflow configuration settings.
- Tasks like plagiarism checks and ethical approval can be pre-determined and set within the configuration.
- Editors can add unique tasks per article via an “Add” button if permitted by the configuration settings.
- A toggle switch in the configuration settings will enable or disable the creation of new tasks.
3. Task assignment and discussions brainstorming
- Tasks can be assigned either to the default editor or to a person with a specific role.
- Tasks assigned to an editor are only visible to that editor.
- Managing editors, journal editors, and higher roles have access to the entire task list.
- Discussions about tasks can be generated within the task management system.
4. Task completion and deadlines brainstorming
- A simple checkbox will be used to mark tasks as completed.
- Deadlines can be set as workflow defaults.
- Individual task deadlines can be modified as needed.
Email notifications and discussions
The group’s topic examples included: current Issues with email notifications, solving issues (e.g., email content, next, email and discussion integration), direct links to discussion, a toggle for discussion content, essential information for notification emails, ideal discussion and email Integration, and the creation of an email template example.
Interested in the details? Dive a bit deeper into the notes here.
Next Steps
- Using the templates to develop new and improved features for journal workflows.
Thank you
We once again thank the Sprint sponsors, host institutions, and all participants for their valuable contributions to the PKP user community. Special thanks to University of Minnesota Libraries, Library Publishing Coalition, and Crossref for their support and partnerships.
