Proposal: make conflict of interest checker publicly available
Feature Request
Description
I propose to make a standalone form for checking conflict of interest between the authors of a submission and any other person and link to it from the pages where it matters (/submissions/editorial_page/<submission_id>
, /submissions/pool
, /submissions/submit_manuscript/<journal>/<workflow>
).
Proposals
There are several situations in which it is easy to overlook a potential conflict of interest:
- Selecting yourself as an EiC
- Inviting a referee as an editor or listing potential referees as an author
Some of these errors cost a significant amount of time and discussion to rectify earlier accidental mistakes.
SciPost functionality for checking CoI only uses publicly available information, and queries public APIs. To help the users avoid an accidentally forgotten CoI, I propose to make this functionality publicly available to any logged in user. For example it could be a single page form called e.g. /conflict_of_interest_checker
, where one form entry would be a submission ID and another the name of the person to check. In the future, this form could also flag ROR collisions.
Additionally, it might be good to run the corresponding check automatically and invite the user to review the results if there is a potential CoI.
Page URL(s)
-
/submissions/editorial_page/<submission_id>
, link next to "invite a referee" -
/submissions/pool
, a part of the CoI declaration form -
/submissions/submit_manuscript/<journal>/<workflow>
, next to "suggested referees"