A case of author’s remorse immediately after publication of her paper has the editor of the journal calling “bullshit” on the decision to retract the work.
The paper, “Stopping the Revolving Door: Reducing 30-Day Psychiatric Readmissions With Post-discharge Telephone Calls,” was written by a trio of authors from AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, in southern New Jersey and appeared in Cureus on January 12.
Shortly after publication, the named first author, Antonia Phillip, contacted the journal to repudiate the paper. According to the retraction notice, dated January 14:
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors due to miscommunication among them which resulted in a lack of consent from the lead author to submit and publish this article. This author was also not provided an opportunity to review, contribute to, and approve the revisions prior to publication. As a result, Cureus has chosen to acquiesce to this request and retract the article.
Phillip told us:
The reason for retraction is accurate.
We found that answer unsatisfying. After all, journals generally should (but do not always, as we’ve seen) email authors to verify submissions. So we asked Phillip if she’d been contacted by the journal regarding the submission. She hasn’t responded.
But John Adler Jr., the editor of Cureus, said the journal did communicate with the researchers, including Phillip, about their manuscript on more than one occasion. So he was chagrined to see what followed:
all authors were emailed by Cureus multiple times throughout the submission, peer review and publication processes. Moreover, the submitting author was expected to have also been in continuous communication with their co-authors to ensure all were on the same page. There was no fake email. Ultimately one author decided she no longer wanted the article published (for whatever reason) and made the excuse that she never agreed to have it published in the first place. This was a dispute between authors, into which Cureus got dragged.
As much as I hate this “amateur bullshit” it appears that it is the price Cureus must bear if we are to democratize access to scholarly publishing for the vast majority of honest physician authors, many of who come from less wealthy countries and who have been dispossessed by current exorbitantly priced journals.
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It may ( or may not ) sound stupid but what has “…..many of who come from less wealthy countries” has to do with the subject ?
As far as I can tell, all three authors are from the United States.
Exactly !!!
Yes, a third world s**thole country. Not somewhere with an actually functioning medical system like Cuba. What’s your point?
My read is that it was meant as “the vast majority of honest physician authors, many of who come from less wealthy countries” — the goal of Cureus is to help people priced out from traditional venues publish. Doing so reduces the cost of entry, however, and so attracts some “amateur bullshit”, but is still worth doing in order to democratize publishing.
I fully get how it can read worse than that, but I think this is the intention — explaining why the amateur bullshit is a worthwhile price to pay, in service of a good objective.
Would have liked to see the Editor doing a bit of editing on his comments, given the facts of the situation. Not good PR for that journal to be sure…
To whom or what does “amateur bullshit” refer?
I don’t see a problem here. There was a disagreement amongst the authors regarding the final draft late in the process. The paper was submitted without one of the key author’s consent – which I take to be on account of flawed data or its interpretation. So retract the paper and if the other two authors want to publish it they can resubmit it to this or some other journal.
So I ask again, who or what does “amateur bullshit” refer? The syatem worked just as designed.
If the journal is the problem: don’t read it, if you dont trust it.
it refers to authors seemingly unable or unwilling to communicate and resolve disagreements between themselves, instead opting to waste the editor’s and journal’s time and effort to mediate their petty squabbles.
it’s absolutely amateur bullshit, and this inability to effectively communicate on a basic personal level brings into question their scholarly communication abilities as well.
“journals generally should (but do not always, as we’ve seen) email authors” puts a really big burden on journals in fields where papers can have several hundred authors. My journal is working on it, but that could only come after a major rework of our manuscript handling software, which is not quite finished.
What we’ve been doing for now is accept the authors’ assertion that everyone agrees, but bring out a big mace (i.e. ban from the journal for several years, which is a big deal in a field dominated by 3-4 journals) whenever we find that someone lied on the matter. That works fairly well in practice, with just one in ten thousand or so papers found problematic, for an offense that’s very easily identified by the offended authors once the paper is out.
These retractions create a Streisand effect that is far worse than a mediocre publication. This paper is innocuous, obvious even, and would have attracted zero attention had the primary author simply done nothing. Now everyone is looking at her LinkedIn profile and trying to figure out what motivated all this.