PKP Warsaw 2026: Review and Revision workflow
At the PKP Warsaw 2026 Sprint, the Review and Revision Workflow group addressed gaps in OJS revisions, reviewer suggestions, and author transparency.
Group Members
Lucia Gasparovic, Swiss Medical Weekly
Elżbieta (Ela) Nazaruk, University of Technology in Lublin, Poland
Alec Smecher, PKP
Dorien van Rheenen, University Library of Groningen
Katarzyna (Kasia) Zasada, Paradigm Publishing Services
Abstract
This working group examined gaps in the review and revision workflow in OJS, focusing on three themes: the largely missing revisions workflow, insufficient transparency for authors during review, and the lack of a clear status overview on submission lists. The group reviewed existing GitHub issues related to these themes, identified an under-addressed problem around reviewers who don’t respond to invitations, and discussed related topics, including AI-generated papers and reviews, open peer review, and reviewer suggestions. Concrete results included filing a bug report, adding support to an existing feature request for revision due dates and reminders, planning a new feature request to extend reviewer suggestions, and requesting design input on author-facing status information and submission list hierarchy.
Background
The group’s discussion began with participants’ experiences of the current workflow’s gaps. One member, using OJS 3.4, described relying on a separate spreadsheet to track information not captured in OJS, including reviewer invitation timing, which articles still need reviewers, and how long a submission has sat at a given stage — hoping OJS 3.5 might remove that need.
Another member raised concerns specific to the revisions stage: once a submission reaches it, the reason is often unclear, there are no due dates or automatic reminders, and the submission list gives no indication of this status. A third member echoed this, noting authors often write in asking about their submission’s progress, and that editors can struggle to find reviewers in the first place.
From these conversations, the group settled on three central themes: a largely missing revisions workflow, insufficient author-facing transparency, and unclear submission-list status, plus a fourth recurring concern about reviewers who never respond to invitations.
Goals
- Confirm whether a suspected bug related to requested revisions is real.
- Request a design update on the existing revision due dates and reminders issue.
Results
Reviewer suggestions. OJS 3.6 will add a dedicated reviewer-suggestion section at submission, with fields for name, email, affiliation, reason, and conflict-of-interest disclosure; editors can toggle it on or off. The group discussed extending this to let authors and declining reviewers add suggestions after submission, with an indication of who suggested whom.
Author-facing transparency. The group revisited a long-running tension between showing authors too much versus too little review status information — a 2018 sprint had already introduced a plugin to hide certain details. The group considered showing the start date of the current status as a middle ground, and suggested polling authors and editors separately about what information they actually want shared.
Revision workflow. The group worked through existing GitHub issues on revisions and filed a bug report after finding submissions weren’t appearing correctly in the review queue post-revision; a quick fix already appears to address it. The group also discussed design ideas for OJS 3.6’s revision due-date feature, including setting due dates at the point a revision decision is recorded, surfacing this on the editor dashboard, and highlighting pending “call to action” items for authors.
AI-related discussion. The group discussed AI-generated papers and reviews across three angles: detection tools such as iThenticate, the need for a clearer AI-use disclosure policy, and giving users a way to self-disclose AI use.
Outcomes. The group filed a bug report (#12766), commented on an existing revision-reminders feature request (#2687), planned a new reviewer-suggestions feature request, and reached out to PKP’s design team about a clearer submission-list hierarchy.
Next Steps
- File a feature request on the forum to extend reviewer suggestions.
- Follow up on the revision due dates and the reminders design request.
- Continue working with PKP’s design team on submission list hierarchy.
- Gather fresh community input on author-facing review status information.
Read the full notes here.