Outlook calendar integration?

Maybe a strange question, but does anyone have any experience with integrating OJS with an external calendar, like Google Calendar or Outlook calendar? For example to have editorial/review due dates appear in a protected calendar. I’m assuming that this would have to be tied to a specific person’s account, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to eg. make some sort of generalizable (but still protected) feed of editorial notifications that could be ingested by an external calendar app.

Hi @jmacgreg,

Interesting thought – I’m surprised it hasn’t come up elsewhere. To do this, you’d need OJS to generate icalendar-format descriptions of the dates/events – for example, attaching them to notification emails. See more information on that format:

This is a pretty simple development task for each event; the trick is more in identifying which ones should get that support.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Hello all!

This type of integration is interesting to us, but not necessarily a single event, but a “calendar” the user registers/adds to his calendar.

Google has that implemented, so that we can add many calendars to it (holidays, game calendars). OxS could generate calendars for each type of user and their events would be registered in the calendar. Automatic reminders would already pop-up.

It would be interesting to create alerts along with the calendars, if possible. Maybe it’s a calendar software task, unavailable externally.

This would mitigate the dependency on e-mail.

For example, one of our institucional accounts was hacked and our domain entered all possible blacklists, due to spamming. Removing the domain from those lists takes time and effort. Most emails already go into the SPAM bin, when not blocked by other reasons (usually full mail boxes, email address changed).

The calendar would be a safety net, as well as a good tool to check timelines, schedules, etc.

Can you share what specific events you would expect to see exposed within a calendar for each user role? Reviews have clear due-dates which might translate to calendar events. What other examples would be important to your users?

Hello @ctgraham,

The most important roles that really need a calendar are the editorial team members and reviewers especially.
Due to e-mail becoming everyday a hassle instead of a communications solution, we would like OJS not to depend so much on it for that.

The link to the user calendar should be available in the role page, e-mail sent (again, once more dependent on it for something!)
So, for the calendar events and dates:

  • reviewer tasks and deadlines, including info on journal, article basic metadata, link to review (just like the e-mail, but as a calendar event/task with the default deadlines). Cannot tell for sure how “alerts” can be set up, if they could be at all.
  • For the Editor/section editor (and maybe author, to make the editorial process even more “transparent”?) article basic metadata and timeline. Having timeline controls enables process management indicators, which translate to “quality assurance”, improved indexing, and basically ability to get financial support, higher and better submissions etc.
  • For journals who require external tasks such as translations, references and citations normalization, copyediting, layout could benefit of calendar tools, which could also help in production planning, process management and quality/quantity/duration controls/indicators (most of them required for finance, indexing etc.)

I hope this is clear enough… if you require more specific details / use case scenarios, we would be glad to document them.

Thank you, @ramon, for reviving the debate concerning calendar integration in OJS.
Additionally to the points you mentioned above, for our editors it would be very helpful if they could arrange deadlines with our authors, for example for revising an article.
We would very much appreciate it if the dependency on mails (and automated mails, especially!) would decrease and tasks could instead be organized via a shared calendar.
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