Corrections and Retractions

Retraction Guidelines  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.47957/ijpda.corrections_retractions

In order to maintain the integrity and virtue of the journal's scholarly content, we follow COPE guidelines (Please refer to COPE Council.COPE Guidelines: A Short Guide to Ethical Editing for New Editors.May 2019 . (Version 3.). DOI:https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.8 

The journal follows COPE’s retraction guidelines for the retraction process. Please refer to COPE Council.COPE Retraction guidelines- English. DOI:https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4

Reasons for Retraction

1. If the paper was found for any flaw or mismorality of scientific data or similar contents in any part of the paper that would devalue the methods or results or discussions or conclusions that would be obtained from the misconduct of the study, fabricating the results or any data or of any experimental error by human leading to error in calculation or of multiple submission, fraudulent data usage or similar activities.

2. If the data or results or observations earlier published in any other journal if mentioned in the paper detected or reported, without citing appropriately or without procuring relevant permissions, or of any redundant publications.

3. If there is any unethical conduct such as plagiarism or data fabrication or image manipulation, or inappropriate authorship such as gift or ghost author.  Please refer to the following COPEs resources,
a. COPE’s discussion document of Authorship and Contributorship is available at https://publicationethics.org/resources/discussion-documents/authorship 
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.3.3

b  COPE’S Authorship Discussion Document (PDF) available at https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_DD_A4_Authorship_SEPT19_SCREEN_AW.pdf 

4. Conduction of unethical experiments or surveys or research.

Retraction Process

In order to provide ethical and rational scholarly content in our journal and follow COPE guidelines DOI:https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4 we follow the retraction process towards publishing the best scholarly content.

We try to handle the best practices along with COPE Guidelines (Please refer to COPE  Flow charts available at  DOI:https://publicationethics.org/node/19631 )for retraction of paper and we follow the following process,

1.    Complainant or whistle-blower can directly drop an email to the address available at “contact” of our journal web page detailing the title, volume, issue, and nature and details of the complaint.
2.    Managing editor takes responsibility and if needed any member of the editorial board joins to conduct the investigation over the complaint received.
3.    The investigation involves gathering all available emails and communications to and from the journal and authors and from the complainant. 
4.    Enquiries and interrogations with the author and the complaining parties would be made via email.
5.    We try to ensure that the investigation would be conducted using correct procedures and also in support of COPE guidelines DOI:https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4 and not harming or dishonor or blemish scholar publishing rationale and its credibility and without any personal influence or biasing nature.
6.    After the investigation is completed, it will be reported to the Editor in Chief and if needed to relevant editorial board members and the final decision would be arrived. 
7.    Retraction guidelines of COPE would be followed mostly to assure and honor academic credits.

Once the decision is arrived upon for retraction, the article would not be removed but the retraction statement would be published on a separate page in the journal and the link to the original published page will be provided.  Watermark “Retracted” would be included in the article and would be retained in the same volume and page to ensure scientific record maintenance. Thus the following will be executed in the case of “retraction”
1.     The retraction would be displayed on a prominent page of the journal
2.    If there is any retraction, the contents page of the respective issue will have a retraction page with its respective page number.
3.    The title of the retracted paper will also be present in the retraction section of the content page.
4. On the retraction page, reasons for the retraction and the link to the original paper will be made available
5.    Retraction statement would be bi-directionally linked to the original paper to ensure ease of availability of the original article.

Article withdrawals:

Articles that are in press and have been accepted for publishing but not allotted any volume, issue, or page number can also end in withdrawals. Those unpublished papers still in the process of copy editing or uncorrected or under typeset but not allotted any DOI number can be withdrawn at any stage due to various reasons such as unresolvable typo errors, referencing format mistakes, bogus claims, or plagiarism, data manipulations or multiple submissions or ethical or scientific misconduct or any scientific or other similar errors if observed lately. It would be intimated to the respective author and a withdrawal decision would be taken by the managing editor in consultation with the Editor in Chief.

Article Removal

The published article can end in removal for the following reasons,
1. If it infringes any copyright laws or any legal laws
2. If it infringes any intellectual property of any other third party
3. If it infringes the privacy of any individual or institute or organization or any body or society.
4. If a court of law judgments for its removal.
5. If it attracts or causes any communal problems hampering any unlawful situation in the society
6. If it creates any serious health problems

On removal of the article, the title and the author will be retained along with the text mentioning the reason for removal of the article.

Article replacement

If any published article due to any reason has been retracted, and the reasons have been resolved by the author to the satisfaction of the journal’s policy, and if approved by the journal and the corrected article has no reason for retraction can be replaced for the old retracted article. But in this case, the same process of retraction will be followed but in addition, a link for this corrected republished article would be provided in the retraction notice.

Expression of concern

If any misleading content, is found in the published paper and if deducted by the editor or any member of the editorial board member, and if they want to make the reader aware of those content without retracting the paper, the journal issues an “Expression of Concern”.  This editorial “Expression of concern” makes the reader aware of the flaws that influence the paper's integrity. But this is issued if there is any undecided conclusion of any investigations of the respective article or judgment would be unavailable for an undetermined period and if found rationale for issuing the expression of concern. Please refer to COPE case 17-02 Data manipulation and institute's internal review