We are nearing the completion of an investigation into an alleged fraudulent special issue of one of our journals. Someone impersonated legitimate Special Issue editors and invited papers from legitimate authors in the community. We discovered this alleged fraud while reaching out to the people who were listed as the Special Issue editors only to find out from them that they had nothing to do with it. Several of the papers were already published at the time the fraud was discovered and are likely to be retracted, although this decision hasn’t yet been made by our Ethics Committee. Several of the other papers were posted in the publisher’s Digital Library as “Just Accepted” papers, which is a relatively new feature to make accepted, but not yet published versions available to the community. These Just Accepted papers have DOIs already assigned to them (the same DOI as the Version of Records will have), but we are trying to determine whether we can actually “retract” a Just Accepted version of a paper, since technically it hasn’t been “published” yet.
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
If the article is available in any form, then it should be retracted, regardless of whether it is the final Version of Record, or whether it has a DOI. According to the COPE Retraction Guidelines:
"Posting an 'in press' or final version of an article online usually constitutes publication even if the article has not appeared (or will not appear) in print. If an article is retracted before it appears in the print or online version of a journal, or if the journal does not publish in print, the online version of the article should be retained with a clear notice of retraction and it should be included in bibliographic databases (eg, with a digital object identifier (DOI) or other permanent citation). Retaining the original work ensures transparency of the published record, as online versions may have been accessed and cited by researchers prior to retraction."
The retraction notice should be worded clearly to reflect the rationale for the retraction: that is, that it went through a compromised review process. It should make it explicit if the authors were not found to be involved (as seems to be the case here). The journal could also offer the option to the authors of resubmitting their manuscript for review to that journal so that they can ensure it goes through an appropriate process of peer review and decision-making.
If the whole special issue has been affected, then the publisher should retract the whole issue. More guidance on handling ethical concerns with special issues can be found on the COPE website.