NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Trust Markers

Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to provide consumers of published scholarly content with definitions and a framework for understanding items that signal trust in research. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community to join the resulting Trust Markers Working Group. 

 Ethics and integrity cases in submitted manuscripts are becoming an increasingly common problem, while retractions continue to grow at a rapid rate. These cases may be caused by intentional misconduct and fraud as well as a host of unintentional poor research practices. 

Most reputable journals undertake a range of checks to identify these issues ahead of peer review and publication. However, the specific checks undertaken are highly variable and typically not shared publicly on a journal site, and most preprint servers conduct far more limited checks. This means that the process for identifying errors and misconduct is unclear to readers, especially those who are unfamiliar with different scholarly publishing mechanisms and terminology and consume different types of content across a wide range of sites. This includes researchers not versed in a particular discipline, the general public, media and journalists, policymakers, and other nonexpert audiences that may not be familiar with how to assess the credibility of the scholarly content. 

Now more than ever, with the push from funders for greater research impact, the significant increase in fraudulent submissions, and the growing mistrust of scientific information in some parts of broader society, it is crucial to provide clarity on how much trust can be assigned to a piece of scholarly content. 

NISO is inviting experts from across the information ecosystem, especially representatives working in or involved with research integrity, publishing, scholarly research, science communication, metadata registries, identifiers, and academic libraries, to join the Working Group.

“We are excited to develop this Working Group dedicated to the ever important fight for research integrity and transparency,” says Keondra Bailey, NISO Standards Program Manager. “This initiative is another step toward providing users with clear markers for trustworthy research, and NISO is proud to lead this effort."

For more information and to volunteer to join the Trust Markers Working Group, please send an email stating your interest to nisohq@niso.org.