Monday, February 10, 2003

Elsevier Announces New Procedures for Retracting Online Articles By ANDREA L. FOSTER Elsevier Science announced new procedures last week for handling journal articles in its databases that are the product of plagiarism or other research misconduct. Librarians and scholars have complained that the Anglo-Dutch publisher was jeopardizing the integrity of scholarship by removing articles from its databases with little explanation. An article in The Chronicle last month (The Chronicle, January 10) reported that Elsevier had purged dozens of papers from its database and replaced them with a cryptic notice: "For legal reasons this article has been removed by the publisher." In some cases, the purged articles had been plagiarized. The publisher's new plan specifies the conditions under which Elsevier will replace or withdraw articles from its ScienceDirect database, or flag articles for problems. Daviess Menefee, who handles library relations for Elsevier, disseminated the policy in an e-mail message to librarians last Wednesday and Thursday. Under the procedure, an article may be marked for "retraction" if it has been submitted to multiple journals, if it was plagiarized, if it was based on fraudulent data, or if a scholar's claim to authorship was bogus. In such cases, a retraction notice, linked to the original article, will explain why it has been retracted. The digital version of the article will have a watermark indicating it has been retracted. An article may be purged from ScienceDirect if it is defamatory, infringes on others' legal rights, is likely to be the subject of a court order, or might pose serious health risks. In such a situation, only the title and author's name will remain in the database, and readers will be told that the article has been removed for legal reasons. The new policy was greeted favorably by librarians. "Now that Elsevier has put forth this revised version, the challenge to the rest of the publishing/editorial community is to develop similar policies and to make them public," T. Scott Plutchak wrote Friday in an e-mail message to his colleagues. Mr. Plutchak is director of the health-sciences library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association. But he and other librarians said Elsevier should be more specific about why it purges an article from its database. And they wondered whether the policy would apply to articles already removed from ScienceDirect. Mr. Menefee did not return messages Friday seeking comment. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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