Article Retraction & Withdrawal

It is generally a principle of scholarly communication that the journal Editor is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted might be published. By making this decision, the Editor is guided by the journal’s editorial board policies and constrained by legal requirements related to slander, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. The result of this principle is the significance of scientific archives as permanent historical records of scholarly transactions. Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as possible. However, circumstances can occasionally arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under extraordinary circumstances. Throughout cases, our archives at Quantitative Analysis in Tourism and Enterprise Management (QATEM) will hold all versions of articles, including those that were recalled or deleted. 

This policy has been designed to resolve this problem and to consider the best practices in the community of academics and libraries. As standards develop and change, we will revisit this problem and receive all the input from the library and academic community. We believe this problem needs an international standard and will actively lobby for various information to establish a global standard and the best practice that could be adopted by industrial information and publishing. 

Article Retraction

Articles may be retracted due to scientific error in the cases such as multiple submissions, false authorship claims, plagiarism or fraudulent use of data. The author must submit a signed statement before the article can be withdrawn. The consent of all the paper authors is required before a repeal can be published. The retraction notification will be published and linked to the original article marked as cancelled. In addition, the notification will also include withdrawal reasons and who retracted the article. The original article will not be removed from the online and print journal versions but will be identified as a retracted article. Retraction will also be listed on the content page.

Article Withdrawal

Article withdrawal is strongly discouraged and only used in exceptional circumstances for an early version of an article which has been accepted for publication but has not been officially published yet but may have already appeared online. The version may contain errors, have been posted twice, or violate journal publishing ethics guidelines (e.g., multiple submission, false claim about authorship, plagiarism, improper use of data, etc). In such situations, especially in cases of legal/ethical violations or false/inaccurate data that could pose a risk of harm if used, it can be decided to withdraw the article's initial version from our electronic platform. Withdrawal stands for the article content (both HTML and PDF versions) being removed and replaced with HTML and PDF pages, stating that the article has been withdrawn per the QATEM’s withdrawing article policy, along with a link to the policy.

As an additional note, if the author owns copyright for the article, it doesn’t mean that the author has the right to withdraw it after publication. The integrity of the published scientific records is paramount, and this policy on revocation and withdrawal still applies in such cases. 

Article Removal 

In a few cases, the published article may need to be removed from our online platform. It will only happen that if an article is clearly defamatory, or violate another person’s legal rights, or where the article is located, or we have the strong reason to expect, being the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, may pose a serious health risk. In such circumstances, while the article's metadata (i.e., title and author information) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement 

In cases where the article, if followed up, could pose a serious health risk, the author of the original paper may wish to recall the original document and replace it with the corrected version. In such circumstances, the above removal procedure will be followed by differences that the article retraction notification will contain a revised link and republish it along with the document history.

Article Payment

If a paper is accepted for publication, the author must pay an Article Publication Fee to cover publication costs. In cases where an author wishes to withdraw the article, any payments made will be non-refundable.