Submit for Review & Return to Author
- Mandy Gooch
UNC Dataverse offers a feature called ‘Submit for Review’ to its dataverse admin. This is a permissions-level setting that admin and curators can establish on the Dataverse Permissions page.
Submit for Review limits how data contributors may interact with your project or journal dataverse. With this limitation enabled, contributors can create new datasets; however, they are unable to publish their datasets. Instead, the ‘Publish Dataset’ button will be replaced with a ‘Submit for Review’ button.
When a contributor has finished adding data files and updating their metadata, they will click the ‘Submit for Review’ button. This will lock the dataset record so that the contributor can no longer make edits. Additionally, UNC Dataverse will automatically notify the project dataverse admin of a dataset record needing review. The admin can go into the dataverse and review the dataset record for completeness and either ‘Return to Author’ or ‘Publish Dataset’.
If there are issues within the dataset record, an admin may make edits to the record themselves, or they may select the ‘Publish Dataset’ button and choose ‘Return to Author’ from the drop-down.
Returning the dataset record to the author (aka the contributor), will unlock the record so that the contributor can make the necessary changes to their dataset record. Once they’ve completed making those edits, they can click the ‘Submit for Review’ button again to request another review of their record.
When the dataset record meets the requirements of the admin, they may publish the dataset by clicking ‘Publish Dataset’ and ‘Publish’ from the drop-down menu.
This is a useful feature for large project dataverses with many contributors or for journal dataverses who need to review the submissions to ensure compliance with data sharing policies.