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NISO's Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Draft Recommended Practice Now Open for Public Comment

  • 1.  NISO's Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Draft Recommended Practice Now Open for Public Comment

    Posted Tue October 24, 2023 04:11 PM

    **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    Retracted publications are research outputs that are withdrawn, removed, or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 nisohq@niso.org.


    NISO

    2600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 302

    Baltimore, MD 21211

    Phone: 301.654.2512

    E-mail: nisohq@niso.org



    ------------------------------
    Keondra Bailey
    Assistant Standards Program Manager
    National Information Standards Organization
    Baltimore MD
    ------------------------------