PLOS ONE关于"Creator"文章撤稿的解释信
PLOS ONE retraction today
- Friday, March 4, 2016, 4:23 PM
Dear Editors,
As you know PLOS ONE has been in the public eye over the past couple of days regarding an article entitled “Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living”, which contained language suggesting anintelligent design framework. The article was retracted this morning.
We have focused our efforts since Wednesday on re-evaluating the paper and its history, and we have tried to field media questions. We also wanted to address you directly and provide as much explanation as we can at this time.
The decision to retract was taken after a review of the pre-publication process, and a reevaluation of the paper by the editorial staff and two experts, members of the editorial board. In addition to the specific language issue, we concluded that we could not stand by the prepublication assessment of this paper and that there were issues with the rationale and presentation of the findings that were not adequately addressed during peer review.
On this particular occasion unfortunately our internal quality control process and the peer review both failed. PLOS ONE remains committed to maintaining high standards of quality. While these high standards were not met in this instance, we will continue to stress them, and we sincerely hope that the issues with this paper do not reflect negatively on the thousands of authors, academic editors, and reviewers who publish and evaluate the research published in PLOS ONE.
The Academic Editor who handled this paper has apologized for the oversight, and will no longer be handling papers for PLOS ONE. As some of you have noted, the subject of the paper was not a good match for the Academic Editor’s direct area of expertise. This is something we are actively looking into, and although it is a challenging problem at the scale of PLOS ONE, we believe it is extremely important to find better ways of assigning the most relevant editor to each submitted manuscript – and we know it is a source of concern for you in certain fields.
In addition to editor assignment, we are reviewing our internal processes and we are determined to find opportunities to tighten the quality controls without causing unnecessary delays in publication. The quality control checks that we perform in house are meant to support you, while leaving the responsibility of the publishing decision in your hands. On countless submissions, these checks work well and identify issues big and small, but the sequence and depth of these checks will be subject to detailed review to find opportunities for improvement.
Following these immediate actions, we are also reflecting on broader changes to our publication processes. We are deeply grateful for the dedication of the large community of reviewers who commit their time and expertise to PLOS ONE. The value added by these members of the community is not transparent in the current closed review process. We are already working on the capability to offer open signed reviews, in order to provide due credit to the reviewers, and to improve accountability of the process.
The current situation has also highlighted the importance of post publication peer review to permit rapid corrections. We have witnessed this process at work in the past few days, and we hope to continue to build our systems to facilitate such feedback with consideration for quality outcomes and credit.
PLOS ONE relies on the active engagement of the scientific community to accomplish its mission of publishing all rigorous science, and to continuously ensure the robustness of the scientific record. Our processes are intended to support and optimize this engagement. We apologize for the lapse in this particular case and we are determined to evolve our systems to better serve you and the scientific community.
Sincerely,
Iratxe Puebla, Managing Editor, PLOS ONE
Veronique Kiermer, Executive Editor, PLOS
本文转自科学网甘阳博客，特别致谢
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