Understanding the Ex Ordo background check

Ideally, once you have configured your  author submissions and issued your Call for Papers, you will not need to change any requirements for your authors. However, if you do need to change a setting, we have a little helper called a Background Check. This will review all of your submissions to see if your changes have impacted the status of any submission. You will then be emailed with the list of submissions that have changed. Easy peasy!

Note: The Background Check will check and email you even if there are just test submissions in the system.

The best way to get an idea of this feature is to run through an example. 

In this case, you need to add a mandatory question about an Ethics Questionnaire and it was excluded from the original set-up. Therefore, nobody so far has given you an answer. Some of the submissions are completed but you need them to answer this question. What do you do?

Step 1) Add the Question

First thing, you must go to the Configure Author Submission workflow. You can then add or amend any fields needed ( see link here). 

You will be told how many submissions you could change by updating this panel.

Here is the new question we are adding below.

Step 2) Background Check Starts

A little pop-up will appear to let you know we have started checking your submissions. This will take a few minutes to run through all of them and will let you know when it is done. 

When finished you can view the updated submission listing - now they are all Pending. 

Step 3) Email Summary

Once the check is finished, you will receive an email with a list of what you have changed (sample text below) and a file of the changed submissions. You can decide to email the authors using  bulk actions, change your Guide for Authors or leave the authors as they are. The choice is yours!