We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) to improve access to information about retraction policies.
In the coming months, we’ll be publishing guidelines for what we think should be included in retraction notices, and on how those notices should be publicized. As a release describing the new partnership notes:
PRE-val, PRE’s flagship product will include links from their service to the new Retraction Watch guidelines.
When a user clicks the PRE-val badge, a report is opened which contains information related to the journal practices and the peer review process conducted on the article. Retraction policies are included along with journal plagiarism screening, use of ORCID, membership in COPE, and other best practices engaged in by quality journals.
Here’s more about PRE:
PRE-val is a tool provided by PRE (“Peer Review Evaluation”) which was formed to assist members of the scholarly publishing community who are committed to preserving an ethical, rigorous peer review process. PRE-val is a service which is freely available to readers as soon as an article is published and supports publishers in promoting trust and transparency by having their peer review process validated by an objective third party.
This new partnership is similar to the arrangement we announced in March in which PubChase would be linking to Retraction Watch posts. As in that case, we have no financial relationship with PRE.
Keep an eye out for our guidelines, which will be available open access, and which we’ll of course announce here, and send us your ideas on what we should include.
Retraction Watch keeps getting bigger and better!!
great! now let’s hope NPG, Cell Press etc take notice
It is extremely important that criteria for retractions be standardized and that retraction notices clearly articulate the specific reasons for each retraction. I am delighted that RW is taking the lead in this important area.
Congratulations on this great initiative.
Please post your draft proposals for peer review by the RW community before finalizing them with PRE. Whatever procedures you recommend, I hope you will come up with some standard way for journals to distinguish retraction notices that involve any type of documented or admitted scientific misconduct from those based only on innocent error.
This distinction needs to be clear in how retraction notices are indexed by journals and databases such as pubmed.
I wonder what is there to “dislike” about our 3 comments on top.
Comment on form. I do like the standardization of retraction criteria. I so agree with Albert (above) that there becomes a way to distinguish between honest errors and scientific misconduct. While it may sometimes difficult to distinguish, there really must be a way. The form is also confusing where it notes retraction type (multiple responses allowed) and then follows this over in the left hand column with a note that says under “invalidating results” that only one tick is allowed. I think all the reasons for the retraction should be stated. Whether or not these reasons invalidate results or not is another independent question. My two cents! Mary