A technical hiccup led the Journal of Translational Medicine to double publish a 2012 paper by a pair of researchers from China and the United States, leading to a retraction.
The article is/was titled “Opportunities and challenges of disease biomarkers: a new section in the journal of translational medicine,” and it was written by Xiangdong Wang and Peter Ward — both members of the journal’s editorial board. It appeared in the Nov. 7, 2012 issue of the JTM. And it appeared less than a month later, on Dec. 5.
As the retraction notice explains:
The publisher has retracted this article [1] because it was republished in error [2] due to technical reasons. BioMed Central apologize to the authors and readers for the error and any inconvenience caused.
In case you’re wondering, here’s what the article has to say:
Disease biomarkers are defined to diagnose various phases of diseases, monitor severities of diseases and responses to therapies, or predict prognosis of patients. Disease-specific biomarkers should benefit drug discovery and development, integrate multidisciplinary sciences, be validated by molecular imaging. The opportunities and challenges in biomarker development are emphasized and considered. The Journal of Translational Medicine opens a new Section of Disease Biomarkers to bridge identification and validation of gene or protein-based biomarkers, network biomarkers, dynamic network biomarkers in human diseases, patient phenotypes, and clinical applications. Disease biomarkers are also important for determining drug effects, target specificities and binding, dynamic metabolism and pharmacological kinetics, or toxicity profiles.
This is the second double publication retraction we’ve seen from BioMed Central in a month. But since they’re an open access publisher, at least they didn’t charge $37 for the privilege of reading any of the notices.
Were the authors double-charged the excessive OA fees by BMC? IF yes, did BMC provide a full refund?
I assume that they retracted only one version of the paper, although there are links here pointing only to a June retraction… and the retraction does not indicate if they’re retracting a single version. I don’t understand the mention here in RetractionWatch of “it” — which “it” refers to the paper and which to the retraction?