Article Withdrawal, Removal and Replacement Policy

Authors should keep in mind a few noteworthy points about withdrawal procedures to avoid falling into trouble:

  1. Ideally, a manuscript should be withdrawn only if the authors detect errors or flaws in the manuscript.
  2. In case there is a strong reason for withdrawal, a request for withdrawal signed by all the authors and mentioning the reason for withdrawal must be sent to the Editorial Office in the standard template available here.
  3. A confirmation of withdrawal from the Journal Editorial Office is required for the withdrawal process to be considered complete.
  4. It is unacceptable and unethical to withdraw an Article from the journal just because it is being accepted by another journal or the Author wishes to submit the Article to other Journal, which, for any reason, he considers better than the current Journal.
  5. It is not acceptable practice to withdraw a manuscript after it has been sent for peer review, unless the reasons for withdrawal are very strong.
  6. In cases of withdrawal after publishing, punitive measures in the form of a fine or a ban on submitting Articles to APALM can be taken by APALM Editorial Office.

A. Article Withdrawal Policy

It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the editor of a journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the editor is guided by policies of the Journal’s editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances. In all cases, APALM Editorial Office will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise of the removed articles.

I. Article Withdrawal before publication

Only used for Articles which have not been published yet by APALM and which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like, or may have been accidentally submitted twice, etc.) may be “Withdrawn” from our Journal. Withdrawn means that the article is archived in our database and not further acted upon.

If an Article is withdrawn from APALM, no penalty will be levied. However, if the APC has been paid for any Article already accepted for publication, then this APC shall not be refunded in any case. Depending upon the severity of the errors, the Author(s) may also be banned from submitting their article to APALM.

To withdraw an Article, a formal request has to be made by Corresponding Author in the specified template.

II. Article Withdrawal after Publication

Occasionally a withdrawal after publication will be used to correct errors in submission or publication like Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, and fraudulent use of data or the like. The withdrawal of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with withdrawal after publication have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by APALM:

  1. A withdrawal note titled “Withdrawn: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
  2. In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
  3. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “withdrawn.”
  4. The HTML version of the document, if any, is removed.

A penalty will be levied even if the Article is allowed to be withdrawn after its publication from the Journal and the APC which has been paid for this Article shall also not be refunded. Depending upon the severity of the errors, the Author(s) may also be banned from submitting their article to the Journal.

To withdraw an Article after publication, a formal request has to be made to the Editor by the Corresponding Author in the specified template.

B. 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. Further, the APC paid towards the article publication shall not be refunded and the Author(s) will be banned from submitting their article to the Journal.

C. 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 withdraw the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the procedures for ‘Article withdrawal after Publication’ will be followed with the difference that the database Withdrawal notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document. This process will attract the Penalty. Depending upon the severity of the errors, the Author(s) may also be banned from submitting their article to the Journal.