Article Withdrawal 

1. Withdrawal of articles is not encouraged. It is granted on a case by case basis. Withdrawal refers to Articles of the early version, which have been accepted for publication.  Reasons for withdrawal may include reasons such as:
   1. contains errors
   2. may have been accidentally submitted twice
   3. may violate the journal’s publishing ethics guidelines (e.g. multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or similar incidences)
2. Note to authors: 
   1. Authors do not have the right to withdraw an Article after it is published.
   2. A completed Article Withdrawal Form, indicating valid reason for withdrawing, must be signed by all authors must be submitted to the editorial office.
   3. Authors can only assume their Article has been withdrawn after they received an acknowledgement letter from the editor’s office.
   4. A penalty will be levied if an Article is withdrawn after 10 days of acceptance.

 

Article Retraction

1. Articles may be retracted as per COPE retraction guidelines found at Retraction Guidelines website. on the following grounds:
   
   1. There is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error). 
   2. The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross referencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication). 
   3. It constitutes plagiarism.
   4. It reports unethical research.
2. The decision to retract an article is made on a case by case basis only after the editor consults the author(s) and reviewers. 
3. The author(s) must sign the retraction note and submit it to the Chief Editor before an article can be retracted. All the authors must consent to the retraction before a retraction note can be published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list. However, in the case of some co-authors disagreeing to the retraction of the article, the editor will decide on the retraction upon identifying the dissenting co-authors.
4. On the webpages of the retracted article, a note stating that the article has been retracted from the journal will be posted to replace the article.

 

Article Removal

1. Albeit exceptionally, it may be necessary for a published Article to be removed due to the following reasons:
   1. Defamatory, or infringement of legal rights of others
   2. Possibly a subject of a court order
   3. Violation of the copyright of others
   4. Legal issues arising/expected to arise in the context of the article
2. In such circumstances, the bibliographic information and the PDF file will also be removed. A note, stating that the article has been removed will replace the Article text.

 

Article Replacement

1. Flawed original articles can be replaced with a corrected version. 
2. Only significant corrections such as inaccurately published information etc. will be published. Minor corrections such as spelling or grammatical errors which do not alter the comprehension of a paper will require no corrections.
3. The following actions can be taken for errors discovered in the published article: 
   1. An Errata will be published only when mistakes are recognized in the published article which went unnoticed during Editing and Layout setting in Figures, Tables etc.
   2. A Corrigenda is published when the authors realise that errors in the published article could affect its accuracy or its validity of the scientific content. On the other hand, if readers detect an error in a published article, they can submit the same as a letter to the editor. The author, editor and a reviewer would then assess the validity of the error pointed out. Corrigenda will then be published with reference to the letter and the answers provided by the author.
   3. An Addenda is published if significant information is inadvertently omitted during manuscript submission and the authors would like to add the revised content to the article after publication. The information provided for addendum will undergo peer-review prior to editorial acceptance. The Editor-in-Chief will grant Addendum only if the information is essential to understand a significant portion of the published article.
4. For Errata and Corrigenda, the PDF version of the correction Article is attached to the online version of the original article and a link is created between the errata/corrigenda article and the original article for readers and other users/systems to be aware of the corrections. For corrigenda, the article must follow the format: “Corrigenda: “original article title” (“original article reference”).