Todd Carpenter, Executive Director - NISO Rachael Lammey, Director of Product - Crossref Retracted research is published work that is withdrawn, removed, or otherwise invalidated from the scientific and scholarly record. While relatively rare, this has been a growing and problematic area in scholarly communications. The NISO CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern) 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. This session will describe the progress in developing this best practice and outline the project’s role in the community.

1. Reducing the Risk of
Propagating Retracted
Research
Todd Carpenter, NISO
Rachael Lammey, Crossref
UKSG 2023

2. Growing Challenges In Scholarly Ecosystem
2

3. Effect on Retractions in Scholarly
Publishing
3

4. Why should we care about retractions?
4

5. Why should we care about retractions?
TRUST
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6. COPE Retraction Guidelines
Committee on Publication Ethics’
Retraction Guidelines provide advice and
guidance for editors: when should a
retraction be considered, what to include in a
notice, how quickly to issue a retraction, who
should issue a retraction, and what to do
when there is inconclusive evidence of a
retraction.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4

7. Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science:
Shaping a Research RISRS Project
Led by Jodi Schneider, Professor at University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
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8. Goals of the RISRS Project
Develop an actionable agenda for reducing
the inadvertent spread of retracted science.
Identify how retraction status could be more
thoroughly disseminated
Determining what actions are feasible and
relevant for particular stakeholders who play
a role in the distribution of knowledge.
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Schneider, J., Woods, N.D., Proescholdt, R. et al. Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of
Retracted Science: recommendations from the RISRS report. Res Integr Peer Rev 7, 6
(2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-022-00125-x

9. RISRS Project Recommendations
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10. NISO PLUS Project Idea
Schneider presented her results during the NISO Plus
Conference in February 2021.
CREC was selected as one of the output ideas to be
advanced from the Conference.
A meeting was held in May 2021 to develop a project
proposal, which was approved in the fall of 2021. 10

11. NISO CREC Working
Group

12. Membership
Current members:
Caitlin Bakker, University of Regina (co-chair)
Rachael Lammey, Crossref (co-chair)
Maja Choma, Springer Nature
Alyssa Conaway, ASTM International
Joanna Czerepowicz, Taylor & Francis Group
Tilla Edmunds, Clarivate
Annette Flanigan, JAMA & the JAMA Network
Stephen Flockton, IOP Publishing
Joyce Griffin, Wiley
Patrick Hargitt, Atypon
Emily Hazzard, Silverchair
Sylvia Hunter, Inera
Emily Kean, ProQuest
Rolf Kwakkelaar, Elsevier
Luigi Longobardi, IEEE
Marie McVeigh, Mary Ann Liebert
Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch
Francois Renaville, University of Liege
Michael Roberts, Emerald Publishing Group
Rachel Safer, Oxford University Press
Jodi Schneider, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jessie Slater, AAAS
Heather Tierney, American Chemical Society
Elizabeth Wolf, Copyright Clearance Center
David Wright, Modern Language Association
Jen Wright, Cambridge University Press
Maria Zalm, PLoS
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Former members:
Hendia Edmund, American Society for Microbiology
Hannah Heckner, Silverchair
Catherine Nancarrow, California Digital Library
Deborah Poff, Journal of Scholarly Publishing
Teodoro Pulvirenti, American Chemical Society
Sonal Shukla, Springer Nature
With support from
Nettie Lagace, NISO
Keondra Bailey, NISO

13. “
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?
13

14. “
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?
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15. Thank you to the Sloan Foundation
Support for continued
work on Retractions
Study and the CREC
project is generously
provided by the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation.
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16. ▫ Retracted publications continue to be cited following
their retraction, often with no indication or
acknowledgement of their retraction1,2
▫ The display of retracted status varies both across
platforms and journals, and within platforms and
journals3,4
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The problem
1. Hsiao TK, Schneider J. Continued use of retracted papers: Temporal trends in citations and (lack of) awareness of retractions shown in citation contexts in biomedicine. Quant Sci Stud.
2022;2(4): 1144-1169. doi: 10.1162/qss_a_00155
2. Piller C. Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions. Science. 2021. doi: 10.1126/science.abg5806.
3. Bakker C, Riegelman A. Retracted publications in mental health literature: Discovery across bibliographic platforms. J Libr Schol Comm. 2018;6(1):EP2199. doi: 10.7710/2162-3309.2199
4. Suelzer EM, et al. Challenges in identifying the retracted status of an article. JAMA Network Open. 2021;4(6):e2115648. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.15648

17. 17
1 3 5
6
4
2
May 2022:
Appointment of the
Working Group
July to December 2022:
Phase 1: Information
Gathering
August -
September 2023:
Public comment
period
July 2022:
Approval and
publication of charge
and initial work plan
January to July 2023:
Phase 2: Initial drafting
of recommended
practices document
March 2024:
Publication of the
final NISO
Recommended
Practice

18. 18
▫ Publisher subgroup: investigated workflows
including if and how metadata and articles were
updated and how SoRs were issued
▫ Aggregator/end user subgroup: investigated what
metadata were received, how those metadata were
formatted, and how data transfer occurred

19. 19
Wide spread of data points

20. Scope of Recommended Practice
▫ Focuses on metadata transfer and display
▫ Rationale and justification for retractions, EoCs, and
removals are out of scope
▫ Considers both articles that are the VoR, as well as
other scholarly outputs
▫ Guidance on implementation and operationalization
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21. Outputs
▫ Recommended metadata elements (required,
required if available, optional)
▫ Schema examples to show elements in practice
▫ Flowchart(s)
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22. Recommended metadata elements
▫ Bibliographic information related to both published
item and retraction notice
▫ Retraction notice and retraction should be linked
▫ Use of identifiers (ORCID, DOI)
▫ Reason for retraction = optional
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23. Flowcharts (first iteration)
▫ Adding the ‘how’ and ‘who’ to the ‘what’
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24. Crossref perspective
● We support the registration of
retraction information via our
Crossmark service
● Crossref members (18k+ publishers)
can register retractions with us
● We make that openly available via our
API for the community to use
● Members are encouraged to register it
as ‘best practice’ via our Participation
Reports
● No additional fee to register retraction
information

25. However:
● We know there is technical work involved to implement Crossmark (we plan to
simplify this)
● As of 13 January 2023, there are 208,616 records with an update in the Crossref metadata,
of which 11,744 are retractions. Other databases list more or different articles as retracted:
○ Europe PMC: 12,487 (24 July 2022)
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=PUB_TYPE:retrac
tion
○ PubMed: 11,713 (24 July 2022)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Retracted+publication%5BPublication+Type
%5D&sort=
○ Retraction Watch: 34,870 (24 July 2022)
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx (select ‘nature of notice -
retraction’ before searching)
○ So the community sees thousands or tens of thousands of articles as retracted that
have not been reported in Crossref metadata.
● More information at: Hendricks, G., Lammey, R., & Rittman, M. (2022, September 17). Towards a connected and
dynamic scholarly record of updates, corrections, and retractions. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/6z7s3

26. Takeaways
▫ Retraction information is incomplete and is not
reliably disseminated as part of the scholarly record
▫ We hope this recommended practice and other
parallel improvements will help publishers and the
wider community collect and disseminate this
information in a standard way to the benefit of all
▫ This information is really important for research!
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27. What happens next for the CREC project
Public Comment: mid 2023 (for 2 months)
Webinar to discuss draft in August
Responses to comments and publication of final NISO
Recommended Practice
Goal for publication by first quarter of 2024
Promotion/maintenance
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28. The retraction ecosystem of tomorrow
What will happen in a complex ecosystem of distributed
content, where readers are able to repost and share
works on platforms disconnected from the publisher?
How can we build situational
awareness into the systems of
robust changes in item status,
such as corrections?
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29. Thank you!
Questions?
Todd Carpenter, tcarpenter@niso.org
Rachael Lammey, rlammey@crossref.org
More information on the NISO CREC Working Group:
https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec
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