[Refereeing Reports] Prevent invited referees from writing comments

Referees often write a comment instead of a proper report, which contains more information. On a submission page (submissions/[preprint_id]/) the Contribute a Comment option should be disabled for referees that accepted the refereeing invitation (or maybe all invited referees?) and they should be instructed to Contribute a Report instead.

changed title from Prevent invited referees from writing comments to [Reports] Prevent invited referees from writing comments

changed title from [Reports] Prevent invited referees from writing comments to [Refereeing Reports] Prevent invited referees from writing comments

changed the description

made the issue visible to everyone

closed with commit 4c969943

I apologize for overlooking this issue. I wonder if this fix is premature: sometimes referees may have additional questions to the authors, and use the comments functionality for this purpose. I believe the editor in charge, who vets all communications, can catch the reports erroneously submitted as comments instead.

Dear Anton,

Thank you for your comment. I understand your concern and partially share it. However, in our experience the vast majority of these cases are not caught by editors and the comments are simply accepted. This is often followed by a tech support request asking us to convert a comment into a referee report. This is a very time consuming and error prone process, and it leads to an incomplete report as many of the fields necessary for a report are missing in the comment submission form, so we do not have all necessary information to create a report object. In the few cases that the problem is spotted before vetting, the comment may be rejected and referees are requested to re-submit their report via the appropriate link, but most of the time this request is ignored, as from the referees' perspective their refereeing work was fulfilled when submitting the comment.

This issue was opened due to the sheer volume of tech support requests we receive related to comments that should have been referee reports. While this solution is not optimal, we expect that it will improve the work and user experience of referees, Editors and Editorial Administration. If we see that the restriction leads to bigger problems from referees who want to submit a comment, we will explore alternative solutions.

Thank you for the explanation, I find the argument persuasive. Does that mean that there is no option remaining for a referee to ask for a clarification from the authors during the review? That would be a pity.