Connell L. Open Access Surgery. 2023;16:1–6.
At the authors request, the Editor and Publisher of Open Access Surgery are retracting the published article. The author informed the journal that an ethics request to perform the study was submitted to the local ethics committee as per the hospital policy. Unfortunately, the request was not processed, and a misunderstanding led the author to believe the study had been approved, when in fact no approval had been provided. The ethics approval number provided in the article is not an approval number but rather a processing number. As the study did not receive the appropriate ethics approval prior to commencement the author requested to retract the article and the Editor and Publisher agreed with this decision.
We have been informed in our decision-making by our editorial policies and the COPE guidelines.
The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as “Retracted”.