COPE Retraction Guidelines (Aug 2025): "The purpose of retraction is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity, not to punish the authors"

Quote (Committee on Publication Ethics retraction guidelines, August 2025 update):

"The purpose of retraction is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity, not to punish the authors."

Source: https://publicationethics.org

Confidence: Verified.

Why this framing matters for business writing: A correction without a process change is theater. A retraction stigmatized as failure produces under-disclosure. The COPE framing — corrections exist to fix the record, not punish — is the right disposition to import into Candid editorial process.

Used as the framing for the CANDID REFERENCE: retraction/correction playbook — 4 magnitudes from typo to fundamental retraction (adapted from COPE) (in this brief) — Candid's 4-magnitude retraction discipline (typo / substantive / material / fundamentally wrong) explicitly adopts the COPE framing.