Not all retractions result from researchers’ mistakes — we have an entire category of posts known as “publisher errors,” in which publishers mistakenly post a paper, through no fault of the authors. Yet, those retractions can become a black mark on authors’ record. Our co-founder Ivan Oransky and Adam Etkin, Executive Editor at Springer Publishing Co (unrelated to Springer Nature) propose a new system in the latest issue of the International Society of Managing & Technical Editors newsletter, reprinted with permission below.
Given the serious impacts retractions can have upon the reputations and careers of researchers it is time to call ‘publisher errors’ something other than a retraction. We thought this worth worth circulating if only for the line ‘If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, don’t call it a vulture’.
Retraction Watch has reported on several “retractions” that were the result of publisher error. Usually this comes in the form of duplicate publication. Perhaps an unedited version was published due to an administrative miscommunication. Maybe a production glitch caused the same paper to appear in consecutive issues of the same journal. Possibly a journal was transferring the article to another journal produced by the same publishing house and inadvertently published it in both journals. Then there are a few cases in which a journal rejected an article, published it anyway, and then retracted it.