A study on chronic liver inflammation was pulled from the journal Hepatology because of “insufficient permission by the authors’ funding institution to submit and publish the manuscript.”
The paper, which was published in July, looked into how steatosis, the abnormal retention of fat in the liver, turns into steatohepatitis, also known as fatty liver disease. Researchers found that Treg cells play a central role in controlling the disease.
Unfortunately, the journal’s managing editor didn’t provide any information about the nature of the permission problems, and the notice doesn’t give any details.
Here it is, in full:
Yutaka Shimazu, Masahide Hamaguchi, Takuya Fukuda, Kanji Yamaguchi, Yoshio Sumida, Tatsuaki Tsuruyama, Tim Sparwasser, Akifumi Takaori-Kondo, Michiaki Fukui, Yoshito Itoh, and Naoto Nakamura. Steatohepatitis as impaired immune metabolism induced by liver resident regulatory T-cell depletion. Hepatology 2015; doi: 10.1002/hep.27986.
The above article, published online on July 14, 2015, in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor in Chief, Michael H. Nathanson, the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The retraction has been agreed due to insufficient permission by the authors’ funding institution to submit and publish the manuscript.
It was authored by researchers at Kyoto University, the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine and the Twincore Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection Research GmbH in Germany.
Ann Haran, the journal’s managing editor, told us that the retraction was requested by the authors, but did not respond to a request for more details about the permission issues that affected the paper.
The article was retracted at the request of the authors.
We’ve reached out to corresponding author Masahide Hamaguchi at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the funding institution listed on the paper, and will update if we hear anything back.
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