Build your forms
Kotahi has three forms and one builder for all of them. Choose Forms in the left menu.
- Submission form — what authors fill in. It also decides which metadata fields are available to editors later, and what can be published.
- Review form — what reviewers fill in when they submit a review.
- Decision form — what editors fill in when they make a decision.
Add a field
Section titled “Add a field”Open a form and click the green + below the last field. The Field Properties dialog opens, starting with Field type.
Types are grouped as generic — Text, Rich text, Dropdown selection, Radio buttons, Checkboxes, List of contributors, List of links (URLs) — and special types that Kotahi treats as known metadata, including Title, Abstract, DOI, Attachment, Image attachment and Last edit date.
Choosing a type changes the rest of the dialog.
Field properties
Section titled “Field properties”Field title — what the field is called on the form.
Name (internal field name) — the metadata identifier, for example submission.preprintServer. This matters more than it looks. The name is how the value is carried into JATS export, the public website, the Manuscripts page columns and anything you send to an external system, so it is worth deciding deliberately rather than later.
Field placeholder — prompt text inside the input.
Field description — a fuller explanation, shown beneath the field.
Field options — for dropdowns, radio buttons and checkboxes, the list of choices. Add one per line as label | value: the label is what people see, the value is what gets stored. A colour can be set for each.
Short title — used where space is tight, such as concise listings.
Validation options — including whether the field is Required.
Who sees what
Section titled “Who sees what”Three properties decide how a field travels through the workflow:
Hide from reviewers — keeps the field off the Review page.
Hide from authors — collects something without the author seeing it, such as an internal identifier.
Include when sharing or publishing — whether the field reaches publication or stays internal.
Between them they set what authors give you, what reviewers see, and what becomes public — from one form.
The Verdict field
Section titled “The Verdict field”Review and decision forms use a Verdict field for the recommendation or the decision itself.
On a decision form, with Verdict set to Radio buttons and options for Accept, Revise and Reject:
- Accept enables the Publish action
- Revise lets the author submit a new version
- Reject disables the Publish action
More than one form
Section titled “More than one form”Each form type can have several forms, but only one is live at a time. The live one carries an Active badge.
The gear icon beside it opens the Update Form dialog, which holds the form’s title, its description — the text shown above the fields — a Show confirmation page when submitting? choice, and Make this the active form.