The continued referencing of flawed and dodgy papers give them a peril akin to a fictional zombie apocalypse, infecting and afflicting everything in its path, with a very real risk of causing significant harm. We need research institutions, funding bodies, scientific academies and especially research publishers to do more. We have included links to five related items.
In this article, we discuss the continued circulation and use of retracted science as a complex problem: Multiple stakeholders throughout the publishing ecosystem hold competing perceptions of this problem and its possible solutions. We describe how we used a participatory design process model to co-develop recommendations for addressing this problem with stakeholders in the Alfred P. Sloan-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). After introducing the four core RISRS recommendations, we discuss how the issue of retraction-related stigma gives rise to recommendation #4, Educate stakeholders about retraction and pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record. This recommendation is important for training publishing professionals and realizing this recommendation will require further collaborative design work across scholarly communications. We highlight ongoing stakeholder work which is now re-starting the design cycle. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing activities facilitating uptake and refinement of RISRS research and the implementation agenda.
Woods, N.D., Schneider, J. and the RISRS Team (2022) Addressing the Continued Circulation of Retracted Research as a Design Problem. GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing 1/1.
Publisher (Open Access): https://gwpress.manifoldapp.org/read/retraction-as-a-design-problem/section/32a19ddd-381b-4a4c-aac9-bcbfd10c9c0a
