OJS 3.4 brings several significant improvements and new features. Here’s a summary of the key enhancements:
Accessibility and submission wizard
- Rebuilding the submission wizard with improved accessibility. Submission titles can now contain limited formatting, including bold, italic, underline, superscript and subscript. This is particularly important for articles referencing taxonomical names (which are typically formatted in italics) and for review articles (which may reference the reviewed resource by underlined title).
- Redesigned workflow with configurable and user-friendly options.
- Preview feature to provide authors with a submission preview before completion.
- Benchmark analysis and UX tests to enhance the submission wizard’s usability. It is now possible to save/autosave a submission in progress and make a submission file (component) required.
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An improved process for recording editorial decisions
- As part of recording an editorial decision, it’s possible to add any email in CC/BCC fields of the author notification, as well as insert other content.
- A copy of the notification can be sent to reviewers in a separate screen that uses a reviewer-specific email template, maintaining anonymity from authors.
An option to cancel a stage or a review round
It is now possible to cancel an accidentally started review round, unless a reviewer has completed a review. It is also possible to cancel a stage and move the submission to a previous stage, e.g. from Copyediting to Review, with an option to notify the author about this change.
Email notifications
- Revamped UI for sending emails, starting with editor decisions and discussions.
- Improved email templates, making messages more informative and user-friendly.
- Addition of variables for email template editing.
- Ability to add CC and BCC recipients to any email.
The default set of email templates that is included with OJS has been rewritten to be more inclusive and friendly.
Statistics
COUNTER support has been updated to COUNTER Release 5, including tools to report on readership on based on region and institutional access. This has also introduced basic ROR (Research Object Registry) support for institutional subscriptions.
Other Notable Changes
- The submission full-text index is no longer updated at the moment the user performs a new upload. In previous releases this was a frequent source of frustration and the update process could be time-consuming.
- Data availability statement can now be enabled as one of the metadata fields.
- A direct “Unsubscribe” link is now added to system notification emails that support unsubscribing, such as new issue, announcement, discussion notifications, etc.
Monique is the Application Manager of Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP) and some of the WordPress websites of the Library.