Correction & Withdrawal Policies

Environmental Ethics & Law is committed to maintaining academic integrity and quality, we make policies for the correction and retraction of articles published. If authors find an error or inaccuracy in an article published in our journals, or need to retract an article, please refer to the following policies:

Correction

If authors discover any errors or need to make changes to an article before/after publication, authors should notify our editorial department as soon as possible. We will communicate with the author to ensure that corrections are made in a timely manner and that the least disruption to the manuscript is maintained as possible. Corrections should cover corrections limited to substantive, factual errors. We will not approve corrections that involve only the author's opinion or inference.

We will clearly mark corrections in the article,and send the corrected version to the authors for confirmation and publish without error (to ensure that readers get the correct information).
Our editorial department will update the metadata of the article.

*All major errors will be accompanied by a separate correction notice, and Environmental Ethics & Law will: publish a separate correction notice that links back electronically to the corrected version. Conversely, minor errors that do not affect the reliability of the academic content or the reader’s understanding of the academic content will no longer be notified separately for correction. We will add a footnote to the article to inform readers that the article has been corrected.

For authors who wish to correct their names in their published work, please see our Authorship Changes.

Withdrawal policy

The editors of Environmental Ethics & Law are responsible for ensuring the academic integrity of the articles published in the journal. Therefore, in cases of misconduct, the journal editorial department will retract articles when necessary.

Article withdrawal

Considering the amount of time spent by editors and reviewers on handling the manuscript, we have formulated the policy for authors to withdraw requests, as follows:

Once the manuscript is submitted to a journal, it represents that the author has carefully decided to publish the manuscript in our journal. If the author needs to withdraw the article submitted to the journal but not published for any reason, the author needs to submit a formal request to the editorial department of the journal:

Withdrawal requests must be submitted to the journal editorial department by the first or corresponding author of the article, with a full and detailed withdrawal statement. Also, the author submitting the request will need to obtain written consent from all co-authors.
If the article is already in the peer review or publication process, the author will need to provide more specific reasons for the withdrawaland bear all costs incurred as a result.
Only valid and reasonable reasons for withdrawal will be considered, and the decision to withdraw a submission will ultimately rest with the managing editor or editor-in-chief.

Article retraction

For published articles, the editor or authors will consider retraction the article, including but not limited to:

There are substantive errors, ethical violations, duplicate publications, or other violations of academic integrity, morality, ethics, laws and regulations.
The credibility and readability of the article have been seriously compromised.
The author has not taken appropriate action to correct the error or problem.

We hope that the policy will provide better safeguards for authors and readers to ensure the quality and reliability of scholarly journals. Article retraction decisions will be made by the COPE Retraction Guidelines. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by several library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Bilingual Publishing Group:

Publish a separate retraction statement titled "Retraction: [Article Title]" that will link to the retracted article.
Add a "retracted" watermark to the published version of the record for the article. The record will be kept in our journal's database, along with the reason and date of the retraction, to ensure data transparency and integrity.

Authors should note that if their accepted papers or articles in the publication are retracted for academic misconduct and ethical violations in research and publication, the article processing fee paid will not be refunded.

The policy is not exhaustive, and the decision to retract a retraction publication will be made at the discretion of the managing editor to safeguard the journal's academic reputation and publication standards.

Circumstances under which an article may be deleted

In rare cases, Environmental Ethics & Law may need to remove articles from the online platforms. This will only be considered in the following cases:

-The article is defamatory, violates the privacy of others or other legal rights;

-Violation of a certain professional ethics or other illegal circumstances.

Expression of Concern

Environmental Ethics & Law will consider concern detailing the focus and ongoing actions, if:

-Inconclusive evidence of author research or publication misconduct

-The results of this publication have not been completed and due to various complexities, the investigation will not be completed for a considerable period of time

All corrections, retractions, and concerns are freely accessible at the time of publication.