Recently, Robert Geller of the University of Tokyo brought an interesting issue to our attention. In following a particular paper that had been flagged with concerns on PubPeer, he saw that the journal had eventually retracted it. Even though the journal was sold under a subscription-based model, it made the retraction notice available outside the paywall– per the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
The paper itself now included a link to the retraction notice – also recommended by COPE – but the retracted article remained behind the paywall. In other words, to read the retracted paper, non-subscribers would have to pay 3300 Yen (about $30).
Geller contacted us, concerned that the journal was continuing to profit from a retracted paper.
It’s a question we’ve never considered before: Should journals make retracted papers freely available, so readers can see what went wrong? Or as subscriber-based journals, should they prioritize making notices available for free, and keep retracted papers behind the paywall, especially given the ongoing concern that papers continue to be cited as valid research even after they’re retracted? Let us know what you think in our poll, below.
[polldaddy poll=9365191]
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All papers subsequently retracted should, as part of a journal’s retraction processes, be made open access. Moreover, any papers accepted as a commentary on an open access paper should also be open access. I just ran across what appears to be an excellent commentary and critique of an open access paper published in PNAS…but the commentary was behind the journal’s subscription paywall! That should never happen, and this sort of “bad form” might be why my college library just cancelled their PNAS subscription. Shame on you, PNAS!
PNAS papers become Open Access after 6 months as a standard. Thus, that “Open Access” paper was just a paper older than 6 months, whereas the commentary simply hasn’t reached that ‘age’ yet. Nothing to do with “bad form”.
As it happens, I’ve encountered something similar twice recently. The first case was Vincent Racaniello’s commentary on “SARS-like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence,” in PNAS. Here Menachery et al. had paid for the OA option, but if one is going to be asked to contribute a commentary, I mean, c’mon.
The second was in JAMA, which made Phadke et al.’s “Association between Vaccine Refusal and Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States” freely accessible (see, e.g., the “full text”) description at the bottom of the CIDRAP report but not the accompanying editorial. (They’re now both paywalled.)
This is getting pretty far afield from the actual question, though, which I’m still mulling over.
We cannot respond to your poll because the question in the poll is substantially different from the question posed in the context of the associated article. In the article, you speak of a subscription-based journal that hosts a retracted paper. My answer to that would be “no” (access only to subscribers). Your poll asks whether journals (without qualification) should make retracted papers free. My answer to that would be “yes”. My “yes” here tacitly assumes that the payment conditions (free or paid) would still govern access to the paper.
In any case, I feel very strongly that retracted papers should not “go out of existence” and must be permanently available from the publisher, or made public domain by the publisher at their policy discretion.
Isn’t the point of retracting a paper to make it NOT available? Please enlighten me.
Indeed, I’m with Dean here. I understand the need for transparency, but if an article has been retracted, it should not be made available any more. If both the article and a retraction notice that points to the article are both made available … *and* such an article is made free (when it previously was not), are we not giving more attention to a retracted article than a perfectly sound non-retracted article?
Of course the reason for retractions will differ, but shouldn’t a retraction be “similar” to an article that was not yet ready for publication? And an article that isn’t ready for publication should be treated like an unsubmited article.
If retracted articles or rejected articles get more attention than accepted articles (all in the name of transparency), then sooner or later people will ask what is the point of getting an article accepted? (This is a sarcastic, rhetorical question… Of course there is still a difference. Until authors have a section called “Articles in progress / Retracted articles” in their CVs and it actually counts for something positive…)
I agree that retracted articles are the least important to be openly available. The fact that many good (not retracted) articles are not available without expensive subscription is a much bigger problem.
I don’t think that retracted papers should not be available at all; they should not just disappear without any trace other than the retraction notice. Retracted papers should however always have a link to the retraction notice or some other clear indication that the article has been retracted. Otherwise you may not find out that the paper has been retracted, If you for example find the paper with a search engine instead navigating through journal’s website.
Dean,
Suppose that your paper cited paper X, your paper was then published and you included a link to the online PDF of the paper you cited, say, for the convenience of your readers. Then, a year later, paper X was retracted and that publisher’s policy is to eradicate the paper. Now when readers attempt to see the paper you cited, the link is broken and the paper cannot be found anywhere, as if it went out of existence.
So, to guard yourself against the possibility of a retraction due to your citing non-existent papers [or replacements that could thwart the point you originally made] you have kept a copy of every paper you cited and make it available on request. But that is just a work-around to the publisher’s attempt to delete the retracted paper from the universe. In fact, you can then put a copy online yourself and issue a correction to your own paper. (yuck).
Everything I have just said applies whether or not the cited paper was in PDF form.
So rather than put this kind of ridiculous inconvenience on all authors, let’s just recommend that publishers must maintain a copy of all retracted papers, modified with a RETRACTED notice, or release them to public domain for all time.
Fee or Free: We should recommend that if a publisher charges a fee, its retractions should change a fee unless the subscriber had a subscription when the original paper was published.
It is quite common that instances of suspected data manipulation in the papers of a given group may not come to light until after one of their other papers is found to be problematic. Often the “trigger” paper for a larger investigation of the group’s body of work, is then found to have more problems than originally thought. For example, someone might spot an image that has been reused across a couple of different papers, and was also reused in a retracted paper. If the retracted paper disappears completely from the record, this would never be known. This is important in determining the overall magnitude of the problem – reusing an image twice is demonstrably worse (and less able to be written off as accidental) than only reusing it once.
There have also been instances where work will be retracted from one journal, only to show up a few months later in another (usually low entry bar) journal. It’s important to have both copies, to make sure that any problems in the original have been “fixed” before republishing.
One area that does remain unexplored (to the best of my knowledge) is what happens to copyright of the materials in a paper that is retracted? If the journal had copyright before, do they retain it when retraction occurs, or is it rescinded? If the former, then in theory the “old” journal would have a case to go after the “new” journal for re-publishing their copyrighted material. I’ve tried to ask a couple of journals to do this, but they’re not interested, probably because of the substantial legal fees that would be required to set a precedent.
That is surely true if the article is retracted because of fraud, misconduct, data ownership or authorship dispute. In the first two cases, the data or the method of data gathering is not reliable; in the latter cases, the data should not have been in the public place in the first place. However, for some reasons I don’t understand, more and more I see papers being retracted because new studies came to contradictory results/conclusions. Since some editors have decided that the first study should be retracted, I think the retracted paper should be available to readers, if not to give anyone the freedom to make up his own mind
Teixeira da Silva, J.A. (2015) Pay walled retraction notices.
Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 6(1): 27-39.
http://www.banglajol.info/index.php/BIOETHICS/article/view/24403
DOI: 10.3329/bioethics.v6i1.24403
No vote. 1. Too many variables. More avalability might make a plagiaristic copyright violation worse or spread misinformation. Restricted availability might hide unstated reasons for retractions, etc. It depends. 2. This falls into the category of issues on which the scientific community doesn’t need to take any particular position. Since the dangers of legalism and bureaucratization of science are currently quite real, scientists should avoid making normative rules unless the need is urgent.
Suppose that you wrote a paper and cited paper X in it. Your paper was then published and you included a link to the online PDF of paper X which you cited, say, for the convenience of your readers. Then, a year later, paper X was retracted and that publisher’s policy is to eradicate the paper. Now when readers attempt to see the paper you cited, the link is broken and the paper cannot be found anywhere, as if it went out of existence.
So, to guard yourself against the possibility of a retraction due to your citing non-existent papers [or replacements that could thwart the point you originally made] you have kept a copy of every paper you cited and made it available on request. But that is just a work-around to the publisher’s attempt to pretend that the retracted paper never existed. In fact, you can then put a copy online yourself and issue a correction to your own paper. (yuck).
Everything I have just said applies whether or not the cited paper was in PDF form.
So rather than put this kind of ridiculous inconvenience on all authors, let’s just recommend that publishers must maintain a copy of all retracted papers, modified with a RETRACTED notice, allowing a pay-wall, or release them to public domain for all time.
Fee or Free: We should recommend that if a publisher charges a fee, its retractions should change a fee unless the subscriber had a subscription when the original paper was published.
IANAL, but I strongly suspect that copyright transfer agreements remain in force (sample Wiley one here [PDF]; longer discussion here, with allusions to the “Intellectual Property Group”). Withdrawals, however, of papers that were accepted and posted as “online early,” “in press,” etc., I would guess revert to the authors, as the publisher failed to complete its contractual obligation.
If you’re keeping score at home, the paper that prompted my inquiry was by Obokata et al. (Nature Protocols, 2011). Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is still pricing it at 3300 Yen as of a few minutes ago. Here are links to the paper and the PubPeer comments.
http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v6/n7/full/nprot.2011.356.html#access
https://pubpeer.com/publications/21720318
I checked the two other most recently retracted NPG papers flagged on this site, and they’re still on sale at the full price, so I suppose NPG’s general policy is to enhance revenue in the short run, notwithstanding the possible reputational damage to their brand in the long run. Seems short-sighted to me… But I suppose the people at NPG responsible for this policy are incentivized for short-term revenue enhancement and don’t suffer from any damage to their brand in the long run.
Incidentally, in response to Dean’s comment, above, it is important to flag retracted papers clearly in the on-line journals and databases, so they won’t be relied on in the future by other researchers (this in fact is being done), but they should be left available as part of the historical record, so everyone can see what went wrong.
Very few people actually obtain papers by buying them one at a time through the paywall. Readers of papers either have institutional site-licenses, or obtain the papers without paying through other channels. So making an individual paper open-access in an otherwise paywalled journal will only be a token gesture toward the ideal that journals should not “continue to profit” from retracted papers. The “profit” involved there is not significant.
On the other hand, making an individual paper open-access will make it more available to members of the general public, who don’t have access to or don’t know how to use the other channels for obtaining copies, and won’t pay. I’d like to see open access happen for all papers, but I don’t want it to happen disproportionately for retracted papers. Think of the chemtrails, creation science, and other junk that ends up getting retracted. Do we really want those things to be specially available to the public while the serious papers rebutting them remain paywalled? If we must keep retracted papers available at all (and I guess we must, against the greater harm other commentators have noted that would be caused by suppressing them completely), then let’s at least not give the retracted papers *extra* visibility compared to unretracted papers.