PKP Warsaw 2026: Guest Editor Workflow

At the PKP Warsaw 2026 Sprint, the Guest Editor Workflow group examined role clarity, awareness, and paper-mill risks tied to OJS guest editors.

Group Members

Rob Arnold, Paradigm
Tone F Lenschow, NTNU Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet

Abstract

This working group set out to examine the guest editor workflow in OJS, but its focus shifted toward the actual role and purpose of guest editors, and toward clearer role definitions across the platform. The group found that guest editors for special issues are a more problematic matter than expected: in documented cases, guest editors and their collaborators have misused the role to promote their own publications, causing real harm to journals involved. As a result, the group’s work shifted from workflow mechanics toward awareness. The group concluded there is room for greater awareness of the guest editor role, potential for new functionality such as issue-level and controlled-vocabulary scoping, and a need for guidelines against paper-mill exploitation.

Background

Guest editors are typically recruited for network connections and subject-matter expertise that let them curate a coherent themed collection (expertise that in-house editors often lack), and having a guest editor attached to a special issue carries prestige. The role is usually meant to be scoped by category or controlled vocabulary and limited to a specific issue.

At both group members’ institutions, guest editors come and go frequently, and members have encountered guest editors whose expectations didn’t match the system’s reality, including missing functionality and inconsistent communication. One guest editor expected full control over an issue from creation through publishing, a level that OJS does not grant. The group determined that serving on a special issue is the primary use case for the role.

In OJS, a guest editor holds section-editor permissions but cannot edit metadata by default, cannot be limited to a controlled vocabulary or a single issue, and category assignment requires editing the category itself. The group also traced how the mechanism has developed a poor reputation, citing documented paper-mill cases, including thousands of Hindawi retractions in 2023.

Goals

• Learn the guest editor workflow well enough to train journal managers and their guest editors.
• Generate ideas for improving the guest editor experience within the OJS workflow.
• Understand the reputational risks tied to guest editors, particularly past paper-mill scandals.
• Learn what journal managers and guest editors expect from the role in practice.
• Gather community perspectives on the guest editor experience from forums and GitHub issues.
• Develop ways to clearly inform and restrict guest editors against bad academic practice.

Results

Documentation and communication. The group proposed enriching OJS documentation to clarify the guest editor role and scope, adding more detail to the guest editor invitation email, and adding descriptive text within OJS itself explaining what the role can and cannot do — potentially extended to describe all roles, not only guest editors.

Awareness and safeguards. The group recommended raising awareness among journal editors about the risk of guest editor misuse, possibly through invitation emails paired with a declaration of “honesty.” It also proposed a general review of the guest editor role, and additional checks on peer reviewer assignment to help prevent cronyism, such as tracking who reviews whose papers and how often.

Scoping and access control. The group identified a need to limit guest editors to a controlled vocabulary, similar to functionality in other journal systems, and to automatically hard-limit a guest editor’s access to a specific issue rather than requiring manual category edits.

Role clarity more broadly. Beyond guest editors specifically, the group proposed adding description text to all OJS roles, detailing what each can and cannot access, treating the guest editor problem as a starting point for clearer role definition across the platform.

Together, these ideas point toward a two-part response: closing gaps in what OJS technically allows a guest editor to do, and making sure everyone involved — journal managers, guest editors, and reviewers — understands the role’s boundaries and risks before problems arise.

Next Steps

• Create an email template for onboarding new guest editors.
• Submit pull requests or develop a plugin to implement the proposed changes.
• Make UI design changes to the roles section of OJS, adding descriptions.
• Conduct wider research on community perceptions of guest editors after recent paper-mill scandals.

Read the full notes here.