Insight for peer-review feature/plugin?

I’ve been on the hunt for an opensource publishing system with peer-review workflows, but unfortunately the market is pretty bare… but that’s a story for another day.

At first glance Ghost looks pretty awesome! However, there are a few critical features that would need to be integrated to make it work for me.

The most important feature would be a peer-review approval workflow where an author cannot publish until the manuscript is approved by reviewers (typically other authors and editors):

  • Authors submit manuscript to a collection.
  • Editors are responsible for a collection, sending and managing the review requests
  • Reviewers can’t edit, only provide comments on manuscripts.
  • Authors respond to comments and resubmit their revisions until approved for publication.
  • Ideally the review process is double blind, reviewers cannot see author names and authors cannot see reviewer names

I imagine this workflow could reuse the existing user roles with some tweaks?

Does anyone have any idea if this is possible in the current system, and/or how difficult it would be create?

I’m sure you’ve already looked at this but figured I’d add it on.

I do agree that having a custom flow would be nice. The problem is that everyone has slight variation on what they would like to use. For example I would personally want Editors to be able to review and publish posts collapsing two of your roles into one.

I don’t think you’re likely to get this flow working without some custom code outside of ghost.

For example our community uses Google docs heavily for proof reading, so we could in theory automate the process of publishing by using something like this: Official Ghost + Google Docs Integration

Thanks for the quick response.

This is true, custom workflows are hard to chase. This is for academic paper review, so it has to be more rigid than google docs in the longer term. But maybe there’s something that can fill the gap. Other academia-specific publishing software have peer review systems like OJS3, janeway, and pubpub, but they’re either clunky software or don’t allow paywalls. I think I might run ghost locally and poke around to see what I can come up with.

This looks like you need a combination of Ghost admin and a custom app. The ‘authors’ you call would be ‘contributors’ in Ghost terms. The review and commenting would be outside of Ghost and would use the Ghost admin api to publish once article is ready.

Another option would be to have a custom
admin console , forking off the github repo, which would be less future proof because Ghost team would be updating admin console to align with core changes.

So the first option, web app that stands on its own and can use admin api to talk to ghost could be a better option

That’s a great idea, I think that’s probably the best option. I’d rather not orphan myself from main ghost app by forking it. There is a handful of third party peer review work flows I might be able to integrate through the API. A lot of publications have a parallel workflows for review.

Next challenge is DOIs, integrating latex, auto generating PDFs…