Month: August 2022

I have a hard time standing manuscriptcentral. It is an absolute piece of crap. And unfortunately, it seems that the entire community is stuck with it. I am serving for AE for TCSVT this year. Like many journal publications, it was stuck with the crappy manuscriptcentral.

Just to be realistic, the hit rate of getting a reviewer is very low this day. I have created another tool to extract emails from hundreds of papers. I will now input close to 100 emails per manuscript to secure enough reviewers. It can take at least an hour to do that as manuscriptcentral do not have an import function. And the antiquated UI even expects an editor to input an email one by one.

So I tried to automate that using selenium. I am not an expert on that, but I saw another project using it and so tried to imitate what he did. It is part of the code below (after log in the page of the respective manuscript). And par is email extracted by my other tools. Basically, a csv file with the first two columns are the emails and names of the reviewers. The code is not very refined, but it did the trick.

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

for line in par.split('\n')[8:]:
    
    email=line.split(',')[0]
    firstname=line.split(',')[1].strip().split(' ')[0]
    lastname=line.split(',')[1].strip().split(' ')[1]    
    
    
    driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[0])
    url='javascript:openCreateAccountPopup()'
    addReviewer = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@href="'+url+'"]')
    addReviewer.click()


    driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[1])
    # css_firstname = driver.find_element_by_css_selector('input[name="PERSON_FIRSTNAME"]')
    css_firstname=driver.find_element(By.NAME, "PERSON_FIRSTNAME")
    css_firstname.send_keys(firstname)
    css_lastname=driver.find_element(By.NAME, "PERSON_LASTNAME")
    css_lastname.send_keys(lastname)
    css_email=driver.find_element(By.NAME, "EMAIL_ADDRESS")
    css_email.send_keys(email)
    # css_firstname=driver.find_element(By.NAME, "XIK_ADD_FOUND_PERSON_ID")


    # add_reviewer_img = driver.find_element(By.src,"/images/en_US/buttons/create_add.gif")
    add_reviewer_img = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,"//img[@src='/images/en_US/buttons/create_add.gif']")

    add_reviewer_img.click()

    # case 1 (exist, save and add, best case)

    # add_reviewer_img = driver.find_element(By.src,"/images/en_US/buttons/create_add.gif")

    success=True
    try:
        add_reviewer_img = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,"//img[@src='/images/en_US/buttons/save_add.gif']")
        add_reviewer_img.click()
    except:
        success=False



    # case 2 (save and send email)

    # windows=driver.window_handles
    # print(windows)

    if not success:
        try:
            driver.switch_to.window(driver.window_handles[1])

            iframe = driver.find_element_by_name("bottombuttons")
            driver.switch_to.frame(iframe)


            # add_reviewer_img = driver.find_element(By.src,"/images/en_US/buttons/create_add.gif")
            add_save_send = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,"//img[@src='/images/en_US/buttons/save_send.gif']")

            add_save_send.click()
            success = True
        except:
            success = False

    # case 3 # select from existing, just pick one randomly


    if not success:
        try:
            add_save_send = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,"//img[@src='/images/en_US/buttons/add.gif']")
            add_save_send.click()
            success = True
        except:
            success = False

Below is a message from Ali Rhoades, an experiential learning coordinator.

For students interested in career readiness and job searches, I would encourage them to look into our events page including our Careerapalooza, Career Fair, and other events. Our Careerapalooza is coming up (next Thursday) but this would be a great opportunity for students to informally meet our staff, learn more about our support services (including applying for internship) and join a career community.

Our office just recently launched our Career Communities model, which encourages students to lean into finding internships and jobs specific to their passions and industry, instead of stressing to find experiential learning opportunities strict to their major. For example, if an engineering student was passionate for working in nonprofit, they would find tailored opportunities through their Nonprofit Career Community. This link will also provide them with access to their Handshake accounts (all OU students have free access to this internship and job board) including other helpful resources such as an advisor, additional job posting websites, and career readiness tips. Handshake will be the source where OU posts jobs, internships, externships, co-ops, and fellowships, which has new postings daily. If you would like one of our staff members to visit with your class to share more information about Career Communities and Handshake, please let me know-I’d be happy to set that up for you.

As for micro-internships: OU Career Center will be partnering with Parker Dewey soon, hopefully by the end of September, to have tailored micro-internships exclusively to OU students for local, remote, and regional opportunities that are short term and project based. Until then, students can look for public opportunities through Parker Dewey’s website here.