Cosmos Editorial
A paper on happiness has been withdrawn from publication after the author indicated she was unhappy with it.
Academic integrity watchdog site RetractionWatch reports that the 2017 paper, titled Role of Happiness as a Habitual Process, was published by open-access journal MDPI Proceedings.
The research had its genesis, the site says, as a paper submitted to a conference on digitalisation and sustainability, held in Gothenburg, Sweden in June last year.
The submission was accepted, but the paper’s author, Pujarini Das from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, was unable to make it to the conference in person.
Ms Das was thus surprised to discover that the paper had been forwarded to the journal – presumably after undergoing peer review – and published. She contacted MDPI and asked that the work be withdrawn because she did not consider it ready to appear.
“After discussion with the conference organisers,”publishing services manager Martyn Rittman told RetractionWatch, “we decided to honour the author’s request and retract the paper.”
