An Editor monitoring the Reviews interface has two options for accepting or rejecting suggested changes:
- Accept or Reject within the Reviews interface.
- Move the topic to the Editorial state, and accept or reject in Contribute.
Accept or reject within Reviews is a decisive, consequential action
When you accept or reject suggested changes in Reviews, they are finalized in Reviews.
For example: Reviewers have made four suggested changes in a topic, and you accept three of them in Reviews. When you move the topic to Editorial state in Contribute:
- The three content changes that you accepted are set in place
- You only see the one remaining suggested change.
Primary advantage of Accepting or Rejecting in Reviews
The advantage of accepting or rejecting in Reviews is that you can deal with suggestions immediately, thereby clearing them out of the way and reducing commentary clutter before moving the topic to Editorial and to the Contribute module.
For example, a Reviewer suggests that you replace "teh" with "the".
You immediately accept in the Reviews interface and the suggestion is completely resolved. There is no point in delaying the acceptance for later. When you open this topic in Contribute in the Editoral state, the text has changed and you no longer need to deal with the Reviewer's suggestion.
Disadvantages of Accepting or Rejecting in Reviews
- The primary disadvantage of Accepting or Rejecting in Reviews is that you cannot edit the topic content in relation to a particular suggested change.
For example, a Reviewer has made this comment: "Please check this... you've stated 2011, but I think we released this software in 2010."
If you agree with this comment and accept, nothing happens. Because it is just a comment, the content does not update and you lose the comment when you move to the Editorial state in Contribute.
With this type of suggestion, respond only in Contribute, where you can accept the comment and immediately edit and save the text.
- A second disadvantage is that sometimes reviewers do not correctly select content for insertion, replacement, or deletion, and if you accept, you have grammatical errors such as two spaces between words, or no spaces between words. If you see that this is the case, handle the suggestion in the Contribute module, where you can manually edit and save.
Best Practice for Accepting or Rejecting
- If a valid suggested change requires any manual editing of content, deal with it later in the Contribute module.
- If a valid suggested change doesn't need any futher editing, accept it within Reviews.
- If a suggested change is not valid and doesn't require any further discussion or investigation, reject it in Reviews.