Withdrawing a submitted academic manuscript means asking a journal to stop considering the article for publication.

Authors are allowed to withdraw their manuscript at no penalty if it is withdrawn before the article has been sent out for review. This means that the article will no longer proceed through the peer review process, will not be published and becomes the authors’ “property” once again, to revise and/or resubmit elsewhere if desired.

If an author(s) requests a withdrawal of manuscript at any point during/after the review process, the author will be banned from submitting any manuscript to this journal for the next three years.

To withdraw the submitted article, the author has to communicate with the Chief Editor via e-mail (editorjosma@gmail.com) stating the reasons for withdrawal.

Although manuscript withdrawal is the author’s right in academic publishing, it is generally not recommended, except for certain circumstances such as:

a. Journal delay
If the journal is taking an unreasonably long time to send the paper out for review, author may wish to withdraw the paper and resubmit to another journal that will handle it more efficiently, to avoid any unnecessary delay in time to publication.

b. Problems in manuscript
Author may become aware of problems that were unintentionally introduced to the manuscript. For example, if during the peer review process, the author notices that some of the data included in the paper were reported incorrectly or analysed in a way that could be misleading, then the article can be withdrawn.

c. Discovery of ethical misconduct
This type of withdrawal occurs when, for example, a senior author on the paper discovers that one of the junior authors has engaged in data fraud by fabricating data that were subsequently included in the paper, or has plagiarised part of the text that they were responsible for writing. Another example would be unethical authorship practices, such as when the author listed uncontributed author on the paper for personal interest.