Rovedar understands the importance of completeness of the scholarly record for researchers and librarians and gives the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive. In very occasional cases, it becomes necessary to withdraw, retract, remove, or replace a published article. Such cases are not taken very lightly. Rovedar follows some strict specific rules and policies mentioned below:
Article Retraction
In case of infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, duplication, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like that are determined to violate Rovedar publishing ethics guidelines, a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. Rovedar will consider retracting a publication if:
- It has clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error);
The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission, or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication);
It constitutes plagiarism;
It reports unethical research.
The following standards for dealing with retractions are adopted based on a number of library and scholarly bodies and COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors:
- A retraction note signed by both authors and editor is published in the specific part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list;
- A link is made to the original published article to help the reader see both the retraction note and the article itself;
- A titled “retracted” watermark on the .pdf is added on each page without any change to the original article;
- The HTML, XML, and ePrint version of the document is removed.
A notice of retraction will be posted on the journal page link to the manuscript and on the manuscript itself. The notice of retraction will read:
Rovedar has permanently retracted this manuscript from publication for non-compliance with the Rovedar ________________ policy
specifying the specific policy or policies that are violated. In the event a manuscript is permanently retracted from publication, indexing services will also be notified that the paper has been retracted from publication and the reason(s) for the retraction. The retraction notice will be published and indexing services will be notified as soon as possible after the decision to retract the manuscript is made.
If a small portion of a manuscript is found to be misleading or contains inadvertent plagiarism, corrective actions will be taken. Authors will have the opportunity to rewrite and rectify the problematic sections before resubmission. Once the corrections are made, a statement specifying the corrected page and paragraph, along with the nature of the correction, will be added to the online manuscript’s cover page.
Additionally, corrections may be made if an author has been mistakenly omitted or a non-participating author has been included in the author list. Such corrections will only be implemented with the consent of all listed authors and will not be accompanied by a formal correction notice.
Article Withdrawal
In the event an author(s) requests a withdrawal at any stages of submission time, during the peer review process, and before the acceptance, and after acceptance, it will be evaluated as either a retraction or correction and processed as specified above. In case the APC is paid but the authors demand the withdrawal of articles in Press (those that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information), the manuscript may be withdrawn from our database but the publication fee will not be refunded. The withdrawal requests because of simultaneous submissions to other journals especially when the article is under a peer-review process, will not be accepted. After the peer-reviewing step, the editor processes the withdrawal after investigating the matter. In case of multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, duplication, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like that are determined to violate Rovedar publishing ethics guidelines, the article may also be withdrawn from our database. It means that the article content (HTML, XML, and PDF) is removed and replaced with a statement (the article has been withdrawn according to the Rovedar policy on Article in Press Withdrawal) with a link to the current policy document.
decisions regarding actions like retractions, corrections, or withdrawals, which are not specifically covered in the provided policy, will be made based on the COPE Retraction Guideline.
Article removal (because of legal limitations)
In a limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database so that the “Title and Authors” will be retained, and only the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk.
Article replacement
In case, where an article might pose a serious health risk, the author(s) can replace the article(s) with a correct version. In this case, we will post a notice with a link to the corrected re-published article (plus a history of the document if necessary).