Honoring Your Authors and the Scholarly Publishing Process
/Retraction Watch recently discussed why PLOS ONE's correction rate is higher than average---authors do not review page proofs.
Everyone in scholarly publishing understands that mistakes are made along the publishing process and the bright side of digital publishing allows for quick redaction and updates to scholarly papers. However, when correction rates are higher than what's typically considered acceptable, which is about 1.5%, it's time to look into the workflow to determine what exactly is going on.
Mark Dingemanse, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has been reviewing PLOS ONE correction rate since May 2015. He recently updated his analysis in August 2016:
“Here are the numbers for the whole of 2015: 30970 research articles across all PLOS journals, 1939 corrections (6.3% of publication output), of which 415 acknowledge publisher error (21.4% of corrections). And here’s 2016 so far: 15162 articles, 794 corrections (5.2%) of which 154 are publisher error (19.4% of corrections). So over the last 1.5 years, a full 6% of all PLOS publication output has received corrections, and at least one fifth of these are due to publisher errors beyond the control of authors. Keep in mind authors are essentially powerless and many don’t request corrections, so the problems are likely much worse.”
PLOS ONE makes it very clear that it is against the journal's policy to provide authors with page proofs. Head over to Retraction Watch and read the full story along with the comments and associated links.
At Cenveo Publisher Services, our workflows are built on the trifecta of people-process-technology with the "people" part first. We end with people as well---in the form of author proofs!
Traversing a typical journal workflow process at cenveo Publisher Services.