CASE STUDY 111 (Anonymized)
2012
An article was published in International Journal of Blood Transfusion and Immunohematology (IJBTI) in February 2012.
About eight months after publication of the article, it was discovered that in March 2012, the same article with same author was also published in Journal XYZ.
On 04 October 2012, the authors were contacted and asked for an explanation for the duplicate publication of the article. They were informed that IJBTI strongly discouraged duplicate publication in any form. Authors were advised to withdraw the article from one of the journals. They were also informed that till the time the Editorial Office received their response, the access to the abstract and full text of the article will be restricted and a notice will be placed next to the article stating “Access restricted till further notice”. The right action for the authors would have been to withdraw the article from the journal in which it was published later.
On 05 October 2012, The Editorial Office of IJBTI received an email from the corresponding author stating that after they signed the author agreement form with IJBTI, they received a feedback from the Journal XYZ. As they had already signed the author agreement form with IJBTI, they notified Journal XYZ and asked it not to continue with publication of the article. However, Journal XYZ still went ahead and published it. The authors also wrote that they will again ask Journal XYZ to retract the article.
On 09 October 2012, Journal XYZ sent a reminder to the authors for payment of publication fees for the same article published in March 2012. The authors replied to the email from Journal XYZ with CC of the email to IJBTI. In this email the authors requested Journal XYZ to retract the article post-publication. They also wrote that on 11 April 2012, they had already requested a retraction. In their email to Journal XYZ the authors wrote – “Please kindly retract the article as it is unethical to have an article published simultaneously in different journals.”
On receiving the CC of the email, and being the first journal to publish the article, IJBTI sent the authors an email stating that the notice placed next to their article “Access restricted till further notice” will be removed and to avoid any problems to the authors in future, another note will be placed next to the article asking anyone to contact the Editorial Office of IJBTI for any issues related to the manuscript.
Considering the fact that the authors had clearly asked Journal XYZ to retract the article, the Editorial Office of IJBTI did not communicate with Journal XYZ for the retraction.
As of writing this case study, the article has still not been retracted from Journal XYZ.
Note: The names of authors, journals and publishers have been concealed.