Liz Wager's recent blog in the BMJ discusss how tricky retractions can be, such as a recent one where the retraction was requested by the company who funded the study and whose employees carried out the research. Although there were some errors in the study, the conclusions were valid. (Liz Wager, Trouble with retractions,1 July: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/07/01/liz-wager-trouble-with-retractions/)
This leads into COPE's guidelines on how journals and institutions should cooperate (Cooperation between research institutions and journals on research integrity cases: guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)) and how, in this case, the commercial company is taking a far more active role in attempting to correct the literature than many academic institutions. Liz is currently in the process of developing these guidelines further and wonders whether we should be considering the role of commercial companies as well as academic institutions in these guidelines. What are your thoughts?