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The Lancet has announced changes to its editorial policies following the controversial publication and retraction earlier this year of a paper on COVID-19 patients treated with the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. The changes, described in an comment entitled “Learning from a retraction” last Thursday (September 17), include alterations to peer review and other paper acceptance procedures, and have prompted mixed responses from the scientific and science publishing community.
“The proposed changes are a welcome addition, and I am glad to see Lancet implementing them,” Mario Malički, co–editor-in-chief of the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review, writes in an email to The Scientist. “However, they do not answer the questions at the core of the peer review process. How is it that the Lancet’s editorial team and reviewers (including a statistical reviewer) missed what the research community saw when the paper came out, [and] how do the new ...
