Paper with “missing or placed wrongly” controls retracted because there’s “no editorial mechanism to review the errors”

Two researchers from Singapore are retracting a paper that included errors in three figures because there’s apparently no way to fix the mistakes and have the new work reviewed.

Here’s the notice for “Host-dependent effects of the 3′ untranslated region of turnip crinkle virus RNA on accumulation in Hibiscus and Arabidopsis,” by Weimin Li and Sek-Man Wong of National University of Singapore and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory:

The authors regret to inform the readers of Journal of General Virology that honest errors were made in the preparation of Fig. 1(c), Fig. 2 and Fig. 3(b) (the rRNA controls were either missing or placed wrongly), such that the findings as presented are deemed unreliable. While the authors stand by the conclusions of the paper, there is currently no editorial mechanism to review the errors. The authors are currently repeating the experiments and will resubmit the paper to Journal of General Virology in due course, but agree to retract the paper at this time, and they regret any inconvenience caused to the readers of the journal.

The paper has been cited four times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’re not quite sure what “no editorial mechanism to review the errors” means, nor why these errors came to light more than five years after the paper was published, but we’ve asked the editor of the journal and will update with anything we learn.

Update, 12 p.m. Eastern, 3/13/13: Editor Stacey Efstathiou, who took over as editor of the journal last year, sent us this detailed response (It turns out that our streams had crossed in reporting this post, and Efstathiou had sent us this last month when we first asked. Apologies for that mixup):

The Editor in Chief of JGV, Professor Richard Elliott (EiC 2007-2012) was contacted on 22nd October 2012 by a scientist working in the field who identified anomalies with certain gel images published in the above manuscript. Dialogue with the corresponding author of the above paper was initiated on 24^th October 2012. In conjunction with input from the  Editor who had handled the paper in 2007, the Editor in Chief investigated the alleged anomalies and concluded that certain data in this publication were unreliable. Following Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines a decision was taken that the paper should be retracted. The EiC contacted the corresponding author on 23^rd November 2011 with suggested wording for a retraction.  The authors wished to repeat relevant experiments with appropriate controls in order to verify their published data and publish a correction or, if necessary, a retraction.   On 10^th December 2012 the Journal insisted on a retraction.

The sentence in the retraction statement referred to in your email reflects the fact that JGV follows COPE guidelines, and has no additional process in place to review data where authors request to repeat their experiments and publish a correction to their original paper.

JGV strongly supports COPE, which recommend retraction in cases where published findings are unreliable. We feel that the COPE guidelines are transparent and fair, hence the approach taken in this case. Retraction and, where appropriate, resubmission is in our view a more rigorous approach.