An attempt to explain the partial 'silent' withdrawal or retraction of a SAGE Advance preprint

Preprints represent a historically important prelude to published papers, if authors select this publication route. Therefore, it is important to preserve preprints as both academic as well as historical records. This case study offers valuable insight into a rare problematic issue in preprint librarianship. A public clue left at a post-publication website (PubPeer) indicated that a preprint of a paper now modified and published in a SAGE journal, Research Ethics, had been published in 2022 in SAGE's preprint server, Advance. After a futile attempt at identifying this preprint at Advance using the author's name, a search for the preprint's title at Crossref search led to the identification of the preprint's corresponding digital object identifier (DOI), where basic bibliometric information (author's name, title, abstract) remains intact. However, all bibliometric identifiers (title, author's name and affiliation, abstract, and DOI) have been removed from the Advance page, except for a short notice claiming that the content was removed. This case study provides some background details that serve to educate academics about the academic and reputational risks of the "silent" withdrawal or retraction (partial or full) of preprints, especially the degradation of the integrity of information science. Much stricter and industry-wide standardized ethical guidelines for preprints and their authors, as well as preprint servers, and the publishers that host them, are needed, to hold them as accountable as peer-reviewed journals and their publishers. A frank debate is needed about the withdrawal or retraction of preprints due to serious ethical or legal infractions.