The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that its draft Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-202X) 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 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, 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Retracted publications are research outputs that are withdrawn, removed, or otherwise invalidated from the scholarly record.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.
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 discussing the work and the public comment period and has made its recording available.
Click here to read the original press release.
