Ethics-related guidelines for authors and article retractions: How do Indian biomedical journals measure up?

Fortification of retraction notices to improve their transparency and usefulness

“…It is not surprising to find variation in an RN's content given that policies for RNs and retractions themselves can vary widely amongst journals and publishers, even those that are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) or the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (Teixeira da Silva & Dobránszki, 2017). Other reasons for variation amongst RNs might include insufficiently clear ethical guidelines pertaining to retractions and/or RNs, even in journals that are hosted on supposedly reputable indexing platforms like PubMed (Bhargava et al, 2019); editorial freedom, namely the freedom of editors to ponder on the available evidence, factor in their own responsibility or oversight, and reach a consensus, which differs between journals (Lundberg, 1988); legal threats by authors, institutes or companies, and thus legal limits to what can, or cannot, be stated in a RN by the issuer (Atlas, 2004; Moylan & Kowalczuk, 2016); legal means are occasionally needed to resolve disputes in academic publishing (Manley, 2019), including the resolution of some retractions (Thielen, 2018); insufficient participation of grass‐roots academics in policy‐making, and excessive reliance on policy groups (e.g., COPE, ICMJE, etc. ), including potential ethical conflicts of interest (Teixeira da Silva, 2019); although authors are free to propose their version or account of facts, a RN's wording is determined almost exclusively by editors, alone, or usually in conjunction with the publisher, possibly involving legal counsel in the latter; we argue that the inability to accommodate an author's participation of author‐centered issues, or for a RN to integrate statements by authors or their point of view, may reflect a reduction of their rights (Al‐Khatib & Teixeira da Silva, 2017).…”

“…It is not surprising to find variation in an RN's content given that policies for RNs and retractions themselves can vary widely • insufficiently clear ethical guidelines pertaining to retractions and/or RNs, even in journals that are hosted on supposedly reputable indexing platforms like PubMed (Bhargava et al, 2019);…”