Judit Bar-Ilan

"The authors of retracted articles gain the most out of the continuous readership and citations of their articles. We should all remember that an author’s h-index score does not distinguish between positive and negative citations. Therefore, even if a retracted article is negatively cited, the citations counts are still calculated towards a higher h-index. In addition, the references appearing on retracted articles also gain since they are too counted towards total citations."

"Unlike other publishers, Elsevier makes all the retracted articles on ScienceDirect free in full text open access format. That means that anyone can download and read them. Since the vast majority of Elsevier articles are not open access, it is a bit strange that they choose to have retracted articles completely open access."

"In 2017 we recommended already that they change this practice and place retracted articles behind a paywall. We have to remember that there are institutions and countries who cannot afford to buy Elsevier content. These institutions rely on open access resources for their academic and scientific work. Therefore, Elsevier has to ensure that retracted articles are not easily accessible. These articles often represent erroneous research in forms of falsified data and findings. Elsevier should make them harder rather than easier to access."