Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal

It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the Editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the Editor is guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances, such as:

• infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like.  (See Article retraction)
• legal limitations upon the publisher, copyright holder or author(s) (See Article removal)
• the identification of false or inaccurate data that, if acted upon, would pose a serious health risk (See Article removal or replacement).

Each of these instances together with the Elsevier procedures is detailed below.

Article Retraction by the Scholarly Community

The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies [1] and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by Elsevier:

• A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
• In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
• The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note and it is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
• The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted”.
• The html version of the document is removed.

Article Removal

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may unfortunately be necessary to remove an article from the online database. 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.

In these circumstances, while the metadata (title and authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a correct version. In these circumstances the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.

In all cases, our official archives at the National Library of the Netherlands will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles.

Elsevier recognises the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attaches the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive. This policy has been designed to address these concerns and to take into account the current best practice in the scholarly and library communities.

As standards evolve and change we shall revisit this issue and welcome the input of the scholarly and library communities. We believe that these issues require international standards and we will be active in lobbying the information bodies to establish international standards and best practices which the publishing and information industries can adopt.

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[1] See the National Library of Medicine's policy on retractions (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/errata.html) and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) concerning corrections and retractions (http://www.icmje.org/index.html#corrections), for example.