Correction: Raising concerns on questionable ethics approvals – a case study of 456 trials from the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection

Correction: Res Integr Peer Rev 8, 9 (2023)

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-023–00134-4

The Competing interests statement in the original article [1] has been updated after concerns raised by readers to the journal. The competing interests statement should now read as follows:

“AS and LB are both involved in separate legal proceedings with D Raoult who has been named in this article, both court trials are pending (as of May 2025). EB is a full-time Novartis employee and his views are his own. The remaining authors have no competing interests to declare.” Since the analysis of these data started before the beginning of the legal proceedings, we did not think of including this at the time of submission of the original article.

Additionally, the 3 supplementary tables in Additional file 2 have been replaced with updated versions, which are attached to this Correction. These changes have been made thanks to additional checks conducted by the editor, publisher, and interested readers. The detailed list of changes is appended below:

• Update of DOIs in “Table S2—Clinical_Research_Papers_With_Ethical_Concerns” for article where the publishing journal has been bought over and DOIs have changed.

• “Table S2—Clinical_Research_Papers_With_Ethical_Concerns” Correction of the publisher in table for the article “10.1016/j.ijid.2020.08.075”

• “Table S2—Clinical_Research_Papers_With_Ethical_Concerns:” Entry 10.1016/j.tmaid.2020.101738 - had a space before the link that was deleted

• All DOIs in Table “Table S2—Clinical_Research_Papers_With_Ethical_Concerns” were replaced with a link containing “https://doi.org” instead of “http://dx.doi.org/”

• Uniformization of the country Senegal (which was sometimes spelled “Sénégal”)

• Some of the ethical concerns listed in “Table S2—Clinical_Research_Papers_With_Ethical_Concerns” were corrected to their appropriate values

• “Table S3—Editors contact” was anonymized to remove names and email addresses of editors

• “Table S1—Studies_with_09-022_IRB” had a duplicate value at row 128 which has now been corrected

• “Table S1—Studies_with_09-022_IRB” has a wrong publisher for 10.21203/rs.3.rs-251817/v1, which has now been updated

• Fig. 1 of the manuscript has been updated to reflect the above changes where necessary. The original and corrected versions of Fig. 1 can be found below.

Fig. 1.

Various subjects, samples, and countries for the 248 studies with the IRB number 09–022

Original Fig. 1:

Corrected Fig. 1:

Fig. 1.

Various subjects, samples, and countries for the 248 studies with the IRB number 09–022

The original article has been corrected.