Your retraction guidelines include comments about corrections. They also advise that notices of retraction should be linked to the original retracted articles. But, it is not 100% clear whether notices of correction (that is, errata and corrigenda, as opposed to retractions) should also be linked directly to/embedded in the original online pieces.
Questions for COPE Council
- Can you advise COPE's position on whether notes about errata and corrigenda should be included in the original online version of the article to which they apply, particularly if the correction has subsequently been made in the html version and the pdf?
- Is it acceptable to publish notice of a particular erratum in a later issue, and correct the existing online pdf and html versions of an article, without including a notice that this has been done in the original online article itself?
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.
The core principle here is transparency: are readers being made aware that what they are reading is not the article as originally published (or in the case of a retraction, why it is no longer to be found as published)? Corrections should always be linked to the original article. Medline and PubMed have mechanisms to do just that. Regarding the precise mechanism, that may depend on the technologies employed by the journal and what is possible.
We would refer you to the ICMJE guidance on corrections and version control