Article Retraction & Withdrawal

It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the Editor of a publication is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted shall be published. In making this decision, the Editor is guided by publication-specific policies and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship: articles which have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as much as possible. However, occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be taken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances.

Athena International Publishing recognizes the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and the wider academic community. Honest errors are a part of science and publishing and require publication of a notification or correction when they are detected. We adhere to the highest standards to maintain the trust in and correctness of our electronic archive and in all cases our official archives at the National Library of the Netherlands will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles.

Our publications operate according to the below policies for making corrections to scholarly published material and follow the current best practices adopted in the scholarly and library communities. As standards evolve and change over time, we will revisit these policies and welcome the input of scholarly and library communities to update them. We believe that these issues require international standards and we will be active in lobbying with various information bodies to establish international best practices that the publishing and information industries can adopt.

Article Retraction

Editors should consider retracting a publication if:

It contains infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent or unauthorized use of data, copyright infringements, undisclosed conflicts of interest, etc.
It contains major errors (e.g. miscalculations or experimental errors) or the main conclusion is no longer valid or seriously undermined as a result of new evidence coming to light of which Authors were not aware at the time of publication.

Editors shall determine based on investigation whether a retraction is required and in such cases shall act in accordance with the Retraction Guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Besides these guidelines, standards for dealing with retractions have also been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies: we refer to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations on Corrections, Retractions, Republications and Version Control and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) policy on Errata, Retractions, and Other Linked Citations in PubMed. Based on these, Athena International Publishing has adopted the following best practice for article retractions:

A retraction notice entitled “Retraction: [Article Title]” which is signed by the Authors and/or the Editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue/volume of the publication and listed in the contents list.
In the electronic version, a link is added to the original article.
The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction notice; it is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
The original article is retained unchanged except for a watermark which is included on each page of the article PDF indicating that it has been “retracted”.
The HTML version of the document is removed.

Note that if Authors retain copyright for an article this does not mean that they automatically have the right to retract it after publication. The integrity of the published scientific record is of paramount importance and COPE’s Retraction Guidelines still apply in such cases.

Article Correction

Editors should consider issuing a correction if:

A small part of an otherwise reliable publication reports flawed data or proves to be misleading, especially if this is the result of honest error.
The Author or Contributor list is incorrect (e.g. a deserving Author has been omitted or someone who does not meet authorship criteria has been included).

Corrections to peer-reviewed content fall into one of four categories:

Publisher correction (a.k.a. ‘erratum’): to notify readers of an important error made by publishing staff (usually a production error) that has a negative impact on the publication record or the scientific integrity of the article, or on the reputation of the Authors or the publication.
Author correction (a.k.a. ‘corrigendum’): to notify readers of an important error made by the Authors which has a negative impact on the publication record or the scientific integrity of the article, or on the reputation of the Authors or the publication.
Addendum: an addition to the article by its Authors to explain inconsistencies, to expand the existing work, or to otherwise explain or update the information in the main work.
Retraction: see previous section. Retractions are normally reserved for publications that are so seriously flawed (for whatever reason) that their findings or conclusions cannot be relied upon. Note that partial retractions are not helpful because they make it difficult for readers to determine the status of the article and which parts may be reliable. Similarly, if only a small section of an article (e.g. a few sentences in the discussion) is plagiarized, Editors should consider whether readers (and the plagiarized Author) would be best served by a correction (which could note the fact that text was used without appropriate acknowledgement) rather than retracting the entire article which may contain sound original data in other parts.

The decision whether a correction should be issued is made by the Editor(s) of a publication, sometimes with advice from Reviewers, Advisory Board members or Editorial Board members. Handling Editors will contact the Authors of the paper concerned with a request for clarification, but the final decision about whether a correction is required, and if so which type, rests with the Editors. Corrections to published articles are bi-directionally linked to and from the article being corrected and are represented by a formal notice both on the PDF- and HTML-version of the article concerned.

Article Withdrawal

Article Removal

Article Replacement