Last week, we announced a new partnership with PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) “to improve access to information about retraction policies.” The first step, we and PRE said, was that Retraction Watch would create guidelines for retraction notices, to which PRE’s flagship product, PRE-val, would link.

Well, it turns out that great minds think alike, or along similar lines, anyway. Today we learned that next week, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) will be discussing a standard retraction form proposed by friend of Retraction Watch Hervé Maisonneuve, who has published several papers on retractions. According to a writeup:

This template would meet the pre-requisites for the COPE retraction guidelines[3] using very simple tick boxes: who is retracting the article, the reason for the retraction and history of errata/ expressions of concern. Then, a free text box would allow the editor to add any information they consider useful.

Here’s the proposed form.

While our guidelines will probably describe what should go into a narrative, instead of form a checklist, and we have a few more items that we think belong in a notice, we can certainly appreciate the appeal of a form that reminds editors what may be missing as they’re working.

COPE is seeking feedback on the proposal, which you can leave here or as a comment on this post, since we’ll be adding a link as feedback.

And we’d like to hear suggestions for our in-process guidelines, too. One commenter left some smart ideas yesterday, so please keep them coming in the comments.

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