Monitoring collaborator and reviewer assignments

Background

You can add reviewers to a review only by means of the Review Form in the Reviews interface.

The Reviewer licensing model works on a limited pool of subscriptions, where you flexibly add and remove reviewers. You typically have more potential reviewers than subscriptions, and rotate the reviewers through the subscription pool as needed.

However, not everybody has the Reviewer role, so a mechanism is required to qualify an organization's reviewers. This is done by means of Role assignment.

A user becomes qualified to be assigned to a review if the Reviewer option is selected.

This is irrespective of licensing. For example, you could qualify five people as reviewers, even if you have only have three subscriptions.

Activating and de-activating Reviewer roles

Reviewers are assigned the Reviewer role, but this role is only activated when assigned to a review, and only deactivated when the review ends, as long as the reviewer is not assigned to another review. A review ends when:

• The review is completed automatically by means of release state change.

• The review is completed manually when an Editor clicks the Review Complete button.

• The review is deleted.

• The review is canceled.

A Reviewer subscription is also freed for use when a user is removed from the review and is not currently assigned to any other reviews.

Note: Author-it Cloud will automatically activate Reviewer-only users if they're account is inactive, but won't automatically activate multi-role users. Automatically activating multi-role users would create security concerns and make it difficult to control non-Reviewer subscriptions.

Monitoring reviewer statistics and participation

Administrators need a means of monitoring the assignment and participation of reviewers. This is possible from Settings>Subscriptions.

The Collaborators line shows:

• Assigned: How many collaborators are currently consuming subscriptions (Active Collaborators).

• Available: How many collaborators subscriptions are still available in the pool of subscriptions for this organization.

  Note: This is not the same as the number of users who have the Collaborator role selected. You can have more authorized collaborators than available subscriptions.

Collaborator Activation

Of those assigned the Collaborator role, the statistics differentiate between active and inactive:

• Active Collaborator: Has the Collaborator role and is allocated as a current collaborator or to an active review.

• Inactive Collaborator: Has the Collaborator role and is not allocated as a current collaborator or to an active review. Collaborators become inactive when all of the tasks to which they have been allocated have closed. This is not the same as the number of available subscriptions.

Users with Editor permission do not use a Collaborator subscription. They can be assigned to a review, but:

• Do not count in the statistics as reviewer participants.

• Do not use a Collaborator subscription when allocated to a review.