The Journal of Paleontology, published by the US Paleontological Society, recently retracted a scientific paper for an unusual reason. The paper, which described fossils found in Australia, contained several errors that had already been corrected by the authors. The editors of the journal, however, accidentally published the wrong version of the manuscript, with the errors uncorrected. Because the corrections were made without using the change control feature, the publisher thought nothing had been changed in the latest version of the document and ignored it. Alerted to the problem after the manuscript was published online, the publishers considered simply issuing a correction, but because the uncorrected passages were distributed across the whole article, they ultimately opted to retract the paper and republish the correct version. One of the authors of the paper, biologist Glenn Brock, from Macquarie University, Australia, called the retraction of his own article a “happy ending.” “The authors are satisfied with the final outcome,” he told the Retraction Watch website.
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