AUTHORS REFERRING READERS TO AN OBJECTIONABLE VERSION OF AN ARTICLE ON A PREPRINT SITE
In the acceptance letter and communications with the authors, the editor requested the authors remove portions of their commentary that contained derogatory comments about individuals and the journal that were deemed inappropriate for discourse in a scholarly publication. The authors agreed to do so. Prior to sending the final version of their commentary to the editorial office, the authors posted an earlier version of their paper – with objectionable material – to a preprint site.
The authors noted in the preprint what material would be removed prior to publication in the journal. In the published version of their paper, the authors linked to the preprint version. Because there was no standing policy to prohibit such action, and to avoid the appearance of bias given that some of the objectionable material was targeted towards the journal, the editorial team allowed the link to be published.
COPE advice
Some journals have a policy that allows content posted to a preprint server prior to journal submission, but not afterwards. This may be a better solution than developing the policy proposed here.
The advice is to be very cautious in creating policies based on a single event no matter how distressing it may be. The preprint does not contain any confidential or fraudulent information, "just" derogatory comments.
In this case the authors took advantage of the absence of a policy, and violated the spirit both of publication in a reviewed journal and of the purpose of preprint servers. The authors seemed to want to bypass the editorial process to be able to continue to make their derogatory comments. If the derogatory comments are sufficiently objectionable, they should be brought to the attention of the preprint server moderators or preprint server’s oversight board.
Ultimately, the Journal has published a sanitized version of the article and is not responsible for what the authors have posted on the preprint server.
