Geri Çekilen Makalelerde Açık Erişim Etkisi

Abstract

Articles published in scholarly journals where scientific research results are presented may sometimes contain errors. In addition to unintentional calculation errors, there are also intentional data fabrication or falsification and plagiarism. The enforcement applied in these cases is the correction or retraction of the articles. Such publications with false or invalid results may pose various risks when they are used as a reference for treatments or policies that directly affect people, societies or countries. An increase is observed in the number of retracted articles all over the world. This increase shows that, according to some studies, more problematic publications are made than before, and according to others, problems are discovered faster than in the past. In studies examining the retraction duration of the articles, it is seen that the periods shorten over the years. It is considered that open access has affected this, since there has been a decrease in the retraction duration especially after 2002. In this study, the impact of open access on time intervals of scientific articles from publication to retraction was investigated. For this purpose, 5398 retracted articles published between 1945-2020 and indexed in the Web of Science database were analyzed. The study has the most extensive data set among the researches on retracted articles and is the first postgraduate study in Turkish academic world. The research is based on the hypothesis that open access articles are retracted in a shorter time span than non-open access ones. However, according to the findings, open access articles are retracted in longer time intervals with a difference of 165 days. As a result of the applied Mann-Whitney U test, this difference was found to be statistically significant and it is considered that this difference is not caused by open access. Some open access articles in the data set were published long before the emergence of the open access concept and the date they were made available to the public is unknown. Moreover, three different types of open access articles, known as bronze, gold and green, differ from each other in terms of the retraction duration. Therefore, the issue of retraction is considered to be multidimensional in terms of causality. As a result of the study, it was determined that the retraction durations of both open access and non-open access articles were reduced over the years. In addition, the ratio of number of open access articles that are retracted within one year after their publication date to the number of all open access retracted articles published in that year has been increasing over the years. This increase is also valid for non-open access retracted articles. Hence, findings reveal that problems of articles are detected more quickly in the recent years than they were in the past. It is thought that open access has a facilitating effect on the detection of flaws and mistakes. Although it is important to detect errors and ethical problems quickly, what is more valuable in terms of the ideal scientific communication environment is that those errors never occur. Considering that the articles are generally retracted due to ethical violations, it is concluded that there is a need to strengthen the rules and enforcements regarding this issue. The spread of openness culture at all stages of scientific research processes is also considered important in order to reveal existing problems and not to repeat them in the future. It is aimed that the findings obtained and the suggestions presented in this research will contribute to studies and initiatives that will raise awareness of publication ethics and research integrity.