CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern) Working Group
NISO RP-45-2024, Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Published!
The Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice is now available! It was approved on June 26, 2024 and published on June 27, 2024.
Description
Retracted research is published work that is withdrawn, removed, or otherwise invalidated from the scientific and scholarly record. This may occur for many different reasons, which can include error, misconduct, or fraud. Although retraction is relatively rare, it has an outsized impact. Retracted research that is integrated into the scientific publication network via citations--either before or after retraction--enables the inadvertent propagation of potentially unsupported or fabricated data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. Once a decision is made to retract, to withdraw, or to publish an expression of concern by an appropriately authorized organization, how do the scholarly communications ecosystem and other information consumers become aware of and share information about the status of the original object?
This working group is creating a NISO Recommended Practice that describes the involved parties, along with their responsibilities, actions, notifications, and the metadata necessary to communicate retracted research across stakeholders' systems. The NISO CREC Recommended Practice will address the dissemination of retraction information (metadata & display) to support a consistent, timely transmission of that information to the reader (machine or human), directly or through citing publications, addressing requirements both of the retracted publication and of the retraction notice or expression of concern. It will not address the questions of what a retraction is or why an object is retracted. It will be consistent with guidelines on retractions published by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the Council of Science Editors.
This working group began its work in Summer 2022. It was known until September as the "CORREC Working Group" but decided to change its acronym to help with understanding about its scope of work.