Review comments: ideas to make them even more useful

During the revision process of a document, there may be several review comments, and they are kept visible to all reviewers as the workflow moves forward. In addition, it may become complex for the editor to manage and separate those already worked on from those yet to be. Below are three ideas meant to turn review comments into a valuable aid to workload management for editors and to prevent them from misleading reviewers.

The screenshot below shows 27 review comments that were submitted while the manual was still the first step of the workflow. These comments were sent by the manual owner to the editor (think of it as an initial evaluation).

Idea 1 - Hiding Review Comments

In the next step of the workflow, there will be other reviewers, perhaps many. To avoid them getting misled by the review comments from the previous workflow step, it would be great if the editor could hide the review comments of that step. The same goes for when the manual is enabled for CAA review in the end, i.e. to avoid the CAA reviewer(s) seeing all comments submitted during the entire revision process.

Idea 2 - Filtering Review Comments

Same scenario as above: in the next step of the workflow, there will be other reviewers, perhaps many, all of which will submit their review comments.

For the editor, it will be difficult to separate these comments from those received in the previous workflow step, which he may have already worked on.

An idea to help the editor manage his workload more efficiently would be a filter for review comments by workflow step.

Idea 3 - Checkbox for Review Comments

As an alternative to Idea 2, perhaps a checkbox could be presented to the editor for each review comment so that he can mark those comments he has worked on, i.e. with the same purpose as the Doc/Rev checkboxes in the compliance connections interface. I prefer Idea 2, though, as it seems more powerful.

Idea 4 - Expanding/Collapsing Pages in the Review Comments List

Many review comments result in the list becoming very long. It would be nice if the editor could collapse/expand the pages in the list of review comments, similarly to how it's done for a TOC.