Evolving the correction of the literature : manuscript versioning , error amendment , and retract and 1 replace 2 3 Jaime

8 Academic publishing is undergoing a highly transformative process, and many rules and value systems that 9 were in place for years are being challenged in unprecedented forms leading to the evolution of novel ways 10 of dealing with new pressures. One of the most important aspects of an integrated and valid academic 11 literature is the ability to screen publications for errors during peer review to weed out mistakes, fraud and 12 inconsistencies, such that the final published product represents a product that has value, intellectually, and 13 otherwise. It is difficult to claim the existence of perfect manuscripts. The level of errors that exist in a 14 manuscript will depend on the rigor of the research group, as well as the peer review that screened that paper. 15 When errors slip through into a final published paper, either through honest error or misconduct, and are not 16 detected during peer review and editorial screening, but are spotted during post-publication peer review, an 17 opportunity is created to set the record straight, and correct it. To date, the most common forms of correcting 18 the literature have been errata, corrigenda, expressions of concern, and retractions. Despite this range of 19 corrective measures, which represent artificially created corrals around pockets of imperfect literature, 20 Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 8 August 2017 doi:10.20944/preprints201708.0029.v1 © 2017 by the author(s). Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY license. 2 certain cases do not quite fit this mold, and new suggested measures for correcting the literature have been 21 proposed, including manuscript versioning, amendments, partial retractions and retract and replace. A 22 discussion of the evolving correction of the literature is provided, as are perspectives of the risks and benefits 23 of such new measures to improve the literature. 24 25