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New NISO Recommended Practice for the Communication of Retractions (CREC) 

New NISO Recommended Practice for the Communication of Retractions (CREC) 

June 2024

Baltimore, MD | June 27, 2024

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced the publication of the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-2024). Funding for the CREC Working Group as well as for research at the University of Illinois’ Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS) project, which aided Working Group deliberations and decisions, was generously provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Retracted publications are research outputs that have been found to be flawed, unreliable, 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 NISO Recommended Practice establishes best practices for the creation, transfer, and display of retraction-related metadata, ensuring that participants (publishers, aggregators, full-text hosts, libraries, and researchers) can communicate retraction information quickly and enabling readers who discover a publication to readily identify its status. 

“With the publication of the CREC Recommended Practice, NISO has taken an important step toward limiting the impact and spread of retracted publications,” stated Caitlin Bakker, Discovery Technologies Librarian at the University of Regina and co-chair of the Working Group. “We thank the Working Group members as well as all those who commented on the draft and helped to ensure that the workflows it outlines address the needs of all interested parties.”

“We’re excited to see the Working Group’s efforts come to fruition,” added 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. “And we hope that wider adoption of the NISO guidelines will help to build trust in science and in academic research more generally.”

NISO’s Executive Director, Todd Carpenter, stated, “With retractions on the rise, the CREC Recommended Practice represents an important cross-industry effort by libraries, publishers, and vendors to advance research integrity. We are grateful to the Working Group and its co-chairs for leading this project, as well as to the Sloan Foundation for its support.”

The NISO CREC Recommended Practice is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec.

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 life cycle 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.