Circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or removed. These are exceptional circumstances and are not taking lightly. When a paper is retracted, the journal and the journal's preservation site will retain all versions of retracted or removed papers. We will follow the best practice and recommendations of ICMJE: http://www.icmje.org/index.html#corrections.

Article withdrawal

Withdrawal could be used for papers in the Press, an early version of the articles, containing some errors or submitted twice. An article could be withdrawn if they represent infringements of professional, ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data. Withdrawn means that the article content is removed and replaced with the statement that the article has been withdrawn according to the SPPH, LLC Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal.

 

Article retraction

Retraction could happen if a manuscript contains infringements of professional, ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data. It may also happen when error correction is needed in a publication. In this case, the following steps will be followed:

 

• A retraction note titled "Retraction: [article title]" signed by the authors and/or the editor will be published in the journal's subsequent issue and listed in the contents list.
• A link will be made to the original article.
• The online article will be preceded by a screen containing the retraction note.
• The original article will be retained unchanged save on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is "retracted."
• The HTML version of the document will be removed.

 

If the paper is clearly defamatory or infringes others' legal rights, 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, we will remove an article from the online database. In these cases, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article replacement

If an author thinks a paper might pose a serious health risk, an author may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these cases, the retraction procedures 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.