Correcting a mistake in my journal article after it's been published

Question

My research is in humanities and social sciences and my article was published in a journal in Dec 2016. When the online issue came out, I immediately realised that a mistaken was made, where quotation marks should be in my article title. This was mainly my fault given that said quotation marks were removed from my original and revised submissions when the first proofread came through to me, and I mistook that as a journal style issue.

Now I'm asking the editor about erratum procedures but based on their responses, I'm beginning to think they don't have such a policy in place. If that is so, what would this community advise I do? Part of my title quoted a well-known figure and the last I want to be accused of is plagiarism! E.g. can I add an errata on my personal/academic webpages and will that be of any use? I'm a final year PhD candidate.

Appreciate any useful help I can get here. Thank you.

Answer 1

The official way of dealing with this (minor errors which don't substantially impact the conclusions of the paper) is with the errata/corrections section in the journal you published in. So you did the correct thing in contacting the editor about issuing a correction/erratum in a future issue of the journal.

Your problem at this point is the fact that the journal doesn't have a formal errata policy. There's two ways to proceed:

The first is to attempt to convince the journal to establish an errata policy, for which you'll be the first example. This is ideal, but the editors might not be willing to do it, as it may involve substantially reworking how their journal is structured. Keep in mind that even if they accept the erratum, they might not actually change the published version of the article (even on their website), instead just adding the correction as a separate "erratum" notice/page.

The second is to simply post the erratum on your professional website, preferably on an official(ish) "errata" page. If the journal doesn't have an official errata policy, then this is probably the best option. It's used extensively by people who publish books (including textbooks). Having it on your own website may limit the visibility of the correction, but it will indicate to people who care that you're being proactive about correcting your mistakes to the best of your ability.