For the past eight years, an education researcher in Spain has been waging an unsuccessful battle – including legal action – to quash a retraction she argues should never have happened.
Her paper, about the use of digital tools in early childhood education, was pulled by Computers & Education just months after it was published in 2015. According to the retraction notice, the article was submitted for publication while it was still under review at another journal, violating editorial policies against duplicate submission.
But according to the researcher, Elena Ramírez Orellana of the University of Salamanca, her paper had already been rejected by the first journal before it was sent to the other. She had the documents to prove it, she said, but that didn’t matter.
“We have never been able to reverse the status of the article,” she told Retraction Watch by email, adding that she had taken the case to court. “What I have learned throughout this process is that evidence related to scientific evaluation is worth far less than private conversations between editors.”
It all began in 2012, when Ramírez Orellana and her colleagues submitted their manuscript to Culture and Education/Cultura y Educación, a bilingual journal published at the time by Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje and later by Taylor & Francis. The paper was rejected based on two reviews, one positive and one negative. The authors appealed, Ramírez Orellana said:
We requested a third referee and the journal agreed. However, the status of the paper, which was rejected, never changed. In December 2012, we reminded the editors of the issue of the third referee, and they said OK, there had been a misunderstanding and they would look into it. The status of the paper remained the same, rejected. We never received any further communication about the third referee.
In support of her claims, Ramírez Orellana shared extensive documentation with Retraction Watch, including screenshots from the editorial management platform (in Spanish).
Two years passed. Then, in December 2014, the researchers submitted their manuscript to Computers & Education, assuming it wasn’t going anywhere at Culture and Education. They had added “new tables and figures, new methodology, new references,” Ramírez Orellana said. They also had rewritten it in English.
Shortly after Computers & Education published the paper, titled “Analysis of classroom practices with an ICT resource in early childhood education,” Ramírez Orellana fired off a fateful email (in Spanish) telling Culture and Education it could stop looking for a third reviewer.
“I will never regret it enough,” Ramírez Orellana told Retraction Watch. “I was really angry about the way our work had been treated in Culture and Education.”
Her message, in turn, caused then-editor of Culture and Education Liliana Tolchinsky to email Computers & Education. According to Ramírez Orellana, Tolchinsky’s email read, in part:
I am contacting you in relation to the paper “Analysis of Classroom Practices with an ICT Resource in Early Childhood Education” by Elena Ramírez, Jorge Martín -Domínguez, Begoña Orgaz and Isabel Cañedo that was recently accepted for publication in Computers & Education. I regret to inform you that the above mentioned paper was submitted to your journal in December 2014 while it was under review in Cultura y Educación /Culture and Education a bilingual Journal published by Taylor and Francis. The authors did not communicate to Cultura y Educación that they were submitting the paper to another journal.
That’s when Computers & Education decided to retract the paper.
“We kept trying to reverse the decision, but it was impossible,” Ramírez Orellana said.
She hired lawyers who contacted Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje. On Oct. 30, 2015, the foundation’s director of publications told the editors of Computers & Education in an email:
After an in-depth assessment of the article’s situation, and after having consulted with all parts involved (authors, Editor of Cultura y Educación and Board of Trustees of Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje), who are all in agreement with the content of this communication, the journal Cultura y Educación considers the above mentioned article rejected prior to the date in which it was first submitted to Computers & Education.
In view of this consideration on behalf of our journal, the policy regarding dual submissions would not have been violated. We thus courteously invite you to reconsider your decision of retracting the article from your publication.
All parts involved would also like to offer our apologies for any inconveniences.
The editor-in-chief of Computers & Education, Chin-Chung Tsai of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, who was among the recipients of the email, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson from Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us:
The authors of the article retracted from Computers & Education submitted the manuscript to the journal, Culture & Education, published by T&F, in April 2012.
The manuscript submitted to Culture & Education was rejected by the journal in June 2012. We were informed by the Editor of Culture & Education that the authors appealed the decision to reject, and the manuscript was sent to an additional reviewer in 2013. The authors submitted the manuscript – in English – to Computers & Education in December 2014. It was subsequently peer-reviewed and accepted in March 2015. Following acceptance by Computers & Education, the authors contacted the editor of Culture & Education to withdraw their manuscript, and the Editor of Culture & Education contacted the Editor of Computers & Education to alert them to the dual submission.
It is the policy of Computers & Education that manuscripts submitted to the journal are not under consideration elsewhere, and the editor decided to retract the article following the information on the dual submissions received from Culture & Education.
The spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the journal had not acted on the 2015 email from Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje.
In 2016, Ramírez Orellana said, she filed a lawsuit against Tolchinsky, Begoña Gros Salvat, another editor at Culture and Education, and Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje:
So far, the results have always been against me, but I am continuing with it because I hope to eventually take the case to the European courts.
Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje declined to comment. Neither Tolchinsky nor Gros Salvat responded to our emails.
Update, 9/18/23, 1100 UTC: In an email sent after our story, Miguel del Río, director of publications at Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje, confirmed to us that the manuscript had not been “correctly flagged as pending” in OJS, the editorial management system the journal used at the time, after it was reopened for a third review. As a consequence, its status continued to show as “rejected.” And when Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje entered into a publishing partnership with Taylor & Francis in 2014, the manuscript was not transferred to the new editorial management system.
After sending the Oct. 30, 2015, email explaining that the article was considered rejected by Culture and Education before it was submitted to Computers & Education, del Río said, there was nothing more the foundation could do. In a written agreement seen by Retraction Watch, Ramírez Orellana’s lawyer declared on the same day that his client and her coauthors would sue neither the foundation nor the journal. But a few months later, that’s exactly what she did, del Río said.
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Shameful behavior by the journal Culture and Education to place the article in limbo (while listing it as rejected) and then maliciously contacting Computers & Education asking for a retraction.
But after the first journal finally figured out that they messed up, Computers & Education refuses to remove the retraction.
Seems like an abuse of editorialship and a misuse of retractions to unfairly punish the authors.
Each case on its merits. There does seem to be unfair treatment of the authors in this case.
In my field, I feel that the abuse of editorship as you point out is precisely the reason why the traditional journals have steadily been losing ground and, instead, journals by Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, PeerJ, etc. have become the primary platforms for cutting-edge research.
Review processes with traditional journals in my field: (a) typically take about a year—and, at times, years and years with top-tier journals; and (b) can often be opaque, unfair, and frustrating, with poor communication as well as some editors and reviewers tormenting authors relentlessly with factually incorrect criticisms to which they appear to latch onto as an excuse for major revisions, rejection, etc.
I realize there are mixed opinions about Frontiers, MDPI, PLOS, PeerJ, etc., but, at least, I know I would NOT be wasting my time and energy interacting with people who appear to derive pleasure from treating scholars poorly!
Just out of curiosity: what is ‘your field’?
My field is on the non-applied, basic research end of STEM. When reviews take too long, we worry about somebody else disseminating papers consistent with our own novel discoveries/perspectives (although, with preprints, things have presumably gotten better).
Also, the review process can frequently be unnecessarily prolonged by reviewers and/or editors, ostensibly trying to push us to cite specific scholars/articles/tenets, etc.—not necessarily because they are relevant but because, I assume, they have interest in promoting them. I can’t tell if these reviewers are promoting their own works or not—because of the blind review process.
Other times (and this happens all the time), reviewer evaluations come back so vastly different, from extremely supportive to extremely dismissive, that the editors can’t seem to make a decision, which drags out the review process much too long. I am not wasting my time and energy, dealing with this nonsense! Instead, I’d rather get my works out and move onto the next phases of my research agenda.
Finally, I have been noticing fewer and fewer “interesting” papers come out in traditional journals.
I don’t think the trend I described is unique to my field, though, from what I have been hearing from some of my STEM colleagues.
I totally agree with your sentiment.
I have published more than 80 papers in healthcare-related fields and have also reviewed more than 200 papers myself. One of my recent papers submitted to a reputable Elsevier title in my field took 3 months to come back from the first round of reviews. It was reviewed by two reviewers and both reviews were very thin. One had only a paragraph of positive comments for the paper and the other suggested minor changes. I resubmitted the manuscript after shortening the results section and moving a table to the supplementary section, and am now still waiting on the original reviewers to accept the request to review (it has already been a week; you can track the status for Elsevier journals). I foresee that it would be at least another month or longer before the paper is formally accepted. In this case, the right thing to do would have been for the editor to come in, actually read the paper themselves and make an editorial decision without resending it to the reviewers and waiting for the (slow) process to pan out.
I have experienced even worse delays with the BMJ journals. One paper only came back from the first round of reviews after almost a whole year and by then the content and findings require alot of updating.
With regard to MDPI, I personally find the process more streamlined and I have had reviews returned within a month that are very detailed and constructive than the ones I’ve received elsewhere. Some of the reviews are gibberish, I have received those before as well. Granted there is always a mixed bag.
Hmm, very troubling issue indeed.
While the behavior of the journal is troubling, the authors also committed misconduct by failing to withdraw their submission before submitting to a new journal. I think it is a good decision to let the retraction stand, and a good lesson to the authors about the consequences of inappropriate conduct. The correct procedure here would have been to formally announce a withdrawal from the first journal before sending to the second
If what the authors write is true and the first journal never changed the official status of the manuscript from “rejected” to “under review”, then the authors are not at fault and cannot be expected to wait forever for the outcome of an editorial process whose continuation apparently was never properly and officially acknowledged. Yes, transparent, early communication that one no longer wants to have a paper reviewed by a journal would help clarify things in such a process. I say this as an author. But as (former) editor, I also say that as long as a paper is not formally accepted as a resubmission and shows up as such on the journal’s manuscript portal, it is obviously not under official review and the paper in question cannot be held captive for months and years. The editor is responsible for logging a resubmission into the system, or asking authors who want a new review to officially resubmit the paper through the portal. As long as that does not happen, the paper is NOT officially under review at a journal.
While I think I understand your general sentiment, I must point out that the status of the manuscript appears to have been marked as “Rejected” for two years. Given this backdrop, I would imagine it would be silly to be reaching out to the editor and say, “Hey, you know the paper you rejected two years ago and never followed up on my request for a 3rd reviewer at that time? Well, I know its status has been “Rejected” all this time but I withdraw my submission at this time…because you can’t dump me. I am dumping you.”
Another questionable retraction may be that of
“A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” by Gianluca Alimonti et al. by European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP), (Springer Nature).
It seems no specific issues were put forward by the third-parties that pushed for the attraction, some of who (news outlets) later touted their involvement in the retraction.
(My principle information for this is at https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-alimonti-addendum)
Our coverage: https://retractionwatch.com/2023/08/25/paper-that-found-climate-crisis-to-be-not-evident-yet-retracted-after-re-review/