Retraction workflow
Deleting unpublished records
Unpublished records can always be deleted and doesn't and it does not require acceptance. By unpublished records, records in the following state are meant:
- draft
- submitted
- accepted
Note that once the a draft record has been deleted, MBDB has no way of recovering it!
Retracting published records
In order to be able to mint DOIs and persistent identifiers in general, it's crucial that they are just that, persistent.
The need of persistence comes from the fact that as soon as the record is published online, it can be cited or otherwise referred to. However, neither the owner nor the MBDB can have the complete overview of how the record is being referred to, and it could have been written into non-editable systems (e.g. references in published scientific literature). For the people who then come looking for the record, they as a bare minimum need, to be able to establish two things:
- That they have found the record that was being referred to (establish identity)
- Whether or not the record is still available (establish accessibility)
To ensure this, a minimal set of metadata needs to be present even for retracted records.
Minimal metadata
The minimal metadata includes:
- Title of the record
- List of depositors
- Record ID
- DOI
- Publisher (MBDB)
- Resource type (Dataset)
- Statement that the measurement files and meta data is not present
- Date Published
- Date Retracted
Initiating retraction
The record owners can initiate this process which will immediate have the effect that only the minimal metadata is available. However, the information is not deleted yet, this requires that an administrator. accepts this. The acceptance is needed as the data cannot be recreated once deleted so we want to ensure
Cancelling retraction request
At any point before the administrator has accepted the deletion, the request can be retracted. However, there's no fixed delay from when the administrator receives the request until they accept it, so do not rely on being able cancel a retraction request for longer than a few minutes.
Acceptance
If there is no evidence of criminal activity, the administrator will normally accept the deletion request.
All other data (including the files) than the minimally required metadata will be deleted.