P53 researcher submitted paper “without permission from his co-authors”

One issue that we see pretty regularly is a paper submitted by one author without the permission of the others.

That’s what’s happened with “p53-induced Rap2B positively regulates migration in cells exposed to glucose deprivation,” published in July by Molecular Carcinogenesis. The paper looks at a protein called p53, well-known to regulate cell growth and, when mutated, cause cancer.

Here’s the pretty straightforward retraction note:

The above article, published online on July 2, 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors; the journal Editor-in-Chief, John DiGiovanni; and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed because author Dong-Sheng Pei submitted the paper to the journal without permission from his co-authors

The journal paper is not indexed in Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We emailed Jun-Nian Zheng, a researcher at Xuzhou Medical College in China who is a corresponding author on this paper along with Pei, to figure out if Zheng knew that the paper was submitted, but we haven’t heard back. It’s not the first time a corresponding author — ie, the person in charge of correspondence with the journal — did not know that the paper was being published.

The Committee on Publication Ethics has some simple advice on what to do to prevent permission issues:

[W]hen a journal receives a manuscript, an acknowledgement should be sent to all of the authors, not just the corresponding author, and all authors should be copied in on all correspondence.

We emailed the Editor in Chief of the journal to see if there’s a backstory here. We’ll update you if either of them get back to us. We were not able to find contact info for Dong-Sheng Pei.

Hat tip: Rolf Degen

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