Would you pay $37 to find out that a publisher had mistakenly printed an article twice?

clinicalgerontologistDo you have a spare $37 that’s just burning a hole in your pocket?

If so, today is your lucky day. You can plunk down your hard-earned cash for a chance to read a retraction notice in Clinical Gerontologist that resulted from a goof by its publisher, Taylor & Francis.

Here’s the notice for “Does Social Desirability Confound the Assessment of Self-Reported Measures of Well-Being and Metacognitive Efficiency in Young and Older Adults?”

This article in Volume 36, Issue 2 has been retracted due to the fact that it was inadvertently published twice in this journal. The original publication of this article is in Volume 35, Issue 3, 2012.

Please refer to the earlier version of the article in all references and citations:

Fastame, Maria C., & Penna, Maria P. (2012) Does Social Desirability Confound the Assessment of Self-Reported Measures of Well-Being and Metacognitive Efficiency in Young and Older Adults? Clinical Gerontologist, 35(3), 239–256. DOI: 10.1080/07317115.2012.660411

We have a few unsolicited suggestions for Taylor & Francis. One is that the authors of this paper — and the readers of Clinical Gerontologist — might appreciate an apology somewhere in the notice.

Two, we’ll cite the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidelines, which say retraction notices should:

be freely available to all readers (i.e. not behind access barriers or available only to subscribers)

This is not the most expensive retraction we’ve seen, by the way. Last year, we wrote about one that would set you back $63 to read. Makes an even $100 for the pair.

Please see an update on this post.

Hat tip: Rolf Degen

6 thoughts on “Would you pay $37 to find out that a publisher had mistakenly printed an article twice?”

  1. Hi Ivan – sorry you had to spend 37 USD to bring us this post…you understandably sound ticked-off about it.

    1. Thanks. Luckily, I have access so I didn’t pay. Those without university affiliations or other sources of access would have to, of course.

  2. Considering how much he gets paid for authoring this column, which is probably nothing, it’s reasonable to be a little ticked off about it. Sounds like something the average researcher wouldn’t feel the need to add to his library…

  3. Whether this is the most expensive retraction ever depends on how you compute it. Presumably, one paid (ka-ching!) $37 to read this Stapelesque-sounding article article in the first place. That’s probably just due to one’s poor judgment — or metacognitive inefficiency, if you will. Sometime later, one finds and downloads (ka-ching!) the second publication, only then locating the link to (ka-ching!) the retraction notice. Total cost: $111 (or roughly the cost of a lunch in Manhattan), of which at least $74 was a total waste, thus breaking the previous record by $9 (or roughly the cost of a lunch in Houston).

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