Article Withdrawal Policy

The editor of a learnt journal is solely and autonomously responsible for selecting which papers submitted to the journal will be published, according to a general principle of scholarly communication. The journal's editorial board's regulations and existing laws pertaining to plagiarism, copyright violations, and libel serve as the editor's guidelines while making this choice. The significance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historical record of scholarly exchanges is a result of this idea. As much as feasible, published articles must stay current, accurate, and unaffected. Rarely, though, there may be situations in which an article published has to be later withdrawn or even deleted. Such measures should not be taken carelessly and should only be used in extreme situations. All article versions, including those that have been retracted or otherwise removed, will always be kept in our official archives at the National Library of the Netherlands.

In order to address these issues and take into consideration the most recent best practices in the academic and library sectors, this policy was created. We will review this topic and solicit feedback from the library and academic community as standards develop and change. We will actively encourage different information groups to create worldwide standards and best practices that the publishing and information industries can use since we think these concerns call for international standards.

Article Withdrawal

Only used for articles in the press, which are draft versions of articles that occasionally have mistakes or may have been sent twice by mistake. The articles may occasionally, although less commonly, violate professional ethical rules by committing multiple submissions, making false claims about authorship, plagiarism, using data fraudulently, or similar offences. Articles that contain errors, are found to be unintentional duplicates of another published article or articles, or are judged to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines (e.g., multiple submission, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, etc.) may be "withdrawn" from Science Direct. Articles in press are accepted for publication but have not yet been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information. When an article is marked as withdrawn, its HTML and PDF content are deleted and replaced with a page and PDF that merely state that the article has been withdrawn in accordance with the Eureka Vision Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal and include a link to the most recent version of the policy.

Article Removal: legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may 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 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 corrected 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.