**Apologies for cross posting**


October 18, 2023 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
announced today that its draft Communication of Retractions, Removals, and
Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-202X)
<https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec> is available for public
comment through December 2. The Recommended Practice is the product of a
working group made up of cross-industry stakeholders formed in spring 2022.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation <http://sloan.org> generously provided
funding for this Working Group as well as for research at the University of
Illinois’ Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS)
project <https://infoqualitylab.org/projects/risrs2020/>, which has
informed Working Group deliberations and decisions.

Retracted publications are research outputs that are withdrawn, removed, or
otherwise invalidated from the scholarly record. There are a number of
reasons why publications may be retracted, but in all cases, correcting the
record requires that these decisions be clearly communicated and broadly
understood so that the research—whether retracted due to error, misconduct,
or fraud—is not propagated.  The goal of the NISO Recommended Practice is
to detail how participants (publishers, aggregators, full-text hosts,
libraries, and researchers) may easily ensure that retraction-related
metadata can be transmitted and used by both humans and machines.
Researchers who discover a publication can then readily identify the status
of the research reported.

“Rather than developing new metadata schemas, the working group instead
focused on how existing, widely adopted metadata schemas could be leveraged
to clearly and consistently transmit retraction-related metadata,”
commented Caitlin Bakker, Discovery Technologies Librarian at the
University of Regina and co-chair of the Working Group. “We realized that
further sponsorship of and detail on existing metadata would be easier to
adopt across such a heterogeneous network of technical and organizational
structures.”

Rachael Lammey, Director of Product at Crossref and Working Group co-chair,
added, “We are eager for potential adopters of the Recommended Practice to
read the text and provide feedback that will help us to improve it before
it’s finalized and published. There are many stakeholders in this
potentially complex metadata transfer workflow, and we hope that readers
will consider how they might directly support improved communications
across the ecosystem.”

“Developing a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public
availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable and timely
information about retractions was one of the recommendations of RISRS, and
we could not be more delighted that CREC has been undertaken by the NISO
Working Group,” expressed Jodi Schneider, Associate Professor, School of
Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and
Principal Investigator for the RISRS II: Research and Development towards
the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern
project.

NISO’s Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace, stated, “NISO
acknowledges the significant effort made by the knowledgeable, energetic
CREC Working Group members over the past year to discuss these workflow
issues and find common ground. This is a problem that can’t be solved in
isolation. Finally, we are grateful to the Sloan Foundation for its support
of this important work.”


The draft Recommended Practice, with commenting capability, is available at
https://niso.org/standards-committees/crec from October 18 to December 2.
NISO also hosted a recent public webinar
<https://www.niso.org/events/crec-public-comment-webinar> discussing the
work and the public comment period and has made its recording available.

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster
discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through
collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional
communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries,
publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support
learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization,
management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting
communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information
standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO
website (https://niso.org) or contact us at [log in to unmask]


NISO

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Baltimore, MD 21211

Phone: 301.654.2512

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