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New Work Item on Retracted Research Approved

New Work Item on Retracted Research Approved

October 2021

Development of Recommended Practice To Begin Soon

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that its proposed work item for a Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice has been approved by NISO Voting Members.

Retracted research is published work that is withdrawn, removed, or otherwise invalidated from the scientific and scholarly record. Although relatively rare, retracted research—including unsupported or fabricated data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results—can be inadvertently propagated within the digital scholarly record through citations. The CORREC Recommended Practice is intended to help address this problem, by clearly identifying parties involved in the retraction process, along with their responsibilities, actions, notifications, and the metadata necessary to communicate retracted research.

CORREC is an output of both the recent Sloan Foundation-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS) and the 2021 NISO Plus conference, where this topic was one of three highlighted by attendees as of highest importance. CORREC will be consistent with existing guidelines, such as those published by the Council on Publishing Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Council of Science Editors (CSE). 

NISO is forming a CORREC Working Group to bring together representatives from key stakeholder groups including publishers, systems and other providers that support them, data repositories, preprint platforms, indexing and aggregating services, and others. Among other aspects of the retractions landscape, the Working Group will consider the channels by which retraction information is distributed and who is responsible for the creation of metadata relating to retractions. The group will propose best practices around populating that metadata and communication of an item’s status and its visibility; and members will create a model workflow process from issuing a retraction notice through display and discovery of the retracted item.

“We are delighted to be working with the community to develop this new Recommended Practice,” said Nettie Lagace, NISO’s Associate Executive Director. “The Working Group’s goal is to improve the dissemination of retraction information and to support consistent, timely transmission of that information to the reader (machine or human). We hope to get input and feedback from a range of stakeholders—publishers, A&I providers, link resolvers, researchers, journalists, repositories, and more—in order to help ensure that CORREC is widely adopted and used.” 

For more information about the Working Group, or to volunteer to participate, please contact the NISO Office at nisohq@niso.org.