In January 2022, The Oncologist switched publishers from Wiley to Oxford University Press.
Last month, the journal issued an extensive correction for one of its most popular articles, a 2020 paper that describes results of a clinical trial the authors claimed found a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer.
The article page that remains on Wiley’s website, however, does not reflect the recent correction.
We asked Wiley whether the publisher would update the page. A spokesperson said:
When a journal moves from one publisher to another, as in this case, it receives a new DOI and a new digital footprint. As a result, our current policy is to keep backfiles online for such journals, and to rely on the current publisher to carry any post-publication amendments.
The publisher is “planning to review this process” in light of new guidelines from the National Information Standards Organisation regarding Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern, the spokesperson said. (Disclosure: Our Ivan Oransky was on the working group for those guidelines.)
As the abstract of the guidelines states:
It is crucial that researchers who discover a publication be able to identify the editorial status of the published item. It is therefore necessary that the identification of retracted items, removed content, and EoCs be effectively communicated to human researchers and that these same features be evident to machine-reading and other automated processes, as well as to other interested parties in the scholarly information workflow.
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“When a journal moves from one publisher to another, as in this case, it receives a new DOI and a new digital footprint.”
Seems a little counterproductive when the whole point of a DOI is to be a *persistent* identifier.