ScholarOne Manuscripts Ideas

ScholarOne Manuscripts Ideas is a community forum for clients to engage with each other and with the ScholarOne Product team around ways to improve the platform experience. Ideas submitted in this forum are useful in surfacing themes and items of critical importance to our users, prioritizing roadmap initiatives, and fine-tuning feature development.

Simplify process to attach files

The current process of attaching files regularly confuses reviewers and editors, and ultimately causes undue delay in publication and increases work load on administrators.  Whenever a user selects a file to be attached, it should automatically BE attached and the form they are working on should auto save. Consider how files are attached with common email applications... drag, drop and done; or select, ok and done... that is simple and intuitive. The current process in ScholarOne requires several steps that make for a very tedious operation, especially so with multiple file attachments. 1) The user must select a file from a list or from their computer. 2) If the screen refreshes, then they may need to scroll back to where they were before. 3) Now they must press the "attach" button. 4) (If uploading/attaching files as reviewer feedback, the user still needs to save the form, otherwise they risk losing the attachments in the event that ScholarOne times out/crashes).
  • Sven Molter
  • Sep 29 2016
  • Open
Editor: Making a Decision
  • Attach files
  • Yaow-Ming Chen commented
    6 Aug, 2019 03:01am

    Cannot agree more. The reviewer can provide their comments in a separated file which should be attached, automatically, to the decision letter to the authors.  

  • Guest commented
    20 Jul, 2018 10:17pm

    Agree; the current setup is sort of asking for the email to go out without the file attachment, potentially causing confusion among the authors, and delays; if the two-step can't be one, could the layout at least be tweaked so that the second step is not forgotten?

    Just pasting in a  previous comment about this even though the OP's description covers it well.
    << The sequence of the Attach feature is the reverse of most email attach features, and is two steps instead of one. You have to scroll past the first "Attach" (bottom left, not linked, just text), Select the File (the opposite sequence of the standard email Attach sequence), and then, in the righthand column, select Attach again (linked). It is this second step, required in a different part of the screen (bottom right), that I am pretty sure people forget, since it is not intuitive, seems repetitive, and in the opposite sequence (Select-Attach) of most email systems.

    Plus, in a standard screen, you can't see the link for the first step (Select) until you scroll down.
    Bc of this layout, and the sequence, it is likely editors will forget to attach the file, which will just cause more confusion to the Authors. So, if the layout could be tweaked to make it more visible, and/or if the Attach feature could be 1-step instead of two, seems like it might be better. I was also wondering if an error message would generate if no file was attached (haven't actually forgotten second step, yet, just have come close).
     
    I attached a scan of what this looks like (the Attach feature, for editors, in First Look - Respond to Author process). Attach appears as text only; you have to scroll down to see the first step, and then complete a second step ("Attach") on bottom right. It's the second step (and the layout of the first one) that is sort of asking for empty emails to go out by mistake, by people working on autopilot re: the normal [reverse] order of attaching a file.
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  • Guest commented
    27 Jan, 2017 04:43pm

    We fully support this. Many of our referees fail to click the "attach" button. It is not hugely obvious they need to do this and can easily be missed.

  • +35

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