**Apologies for cross posting**


Baltimore, MD, October 26, 2022: The National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) today announced that, together with the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), they have been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation grant of $249,998 to prevent the spread of retracted research.

The CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of
Concern) project was approved last year by NISO’s voting members. Led by
Jodi Schneider, associate professor in the School of Information Sciences
at UIUC, CREC will build on her previous Sloan Foundation-funded work,
Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). This new NISO
Recommended Practice will create consistent community practices that enable
publishers, preprint repositories, and discovery services to identify and
signal that a publication has been retracted or has expressions of concern.

Retractions of scholarly content alert readers to unreliable material and
are intended to remove that information from the citable record. However,
information about an item’s retraction status is not always communicated,
and harm can result when the faulty information continues to spread. The
CREC Recommended Practice will help address this issue, by identifying
parties involved in the retraction process, and describing their
responsibilities, actions, and notification methods, as well as the
metadata and display standards needed to communicate retracted research
consistently to both humans and machines.

For more information about CREC please see
https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec.

“The goal of the CREC project is to build more confidence in scientific
discovery,” said Professor Schneider. “To give an example of the problem,
over 200 articles related to COVID-19 were retracted during the first two
years of the pandemic, yet many of those articles were subsequently cited
hundreds of times, without showing awareness of the retraction. Thanks to
the Sloan Foundation’s generous support, we will be able to make this NISO
Recommended Practice a reality, and help stop the spread of faulty
information.”

“We are delighted to be working with Professor Schneider and the wider
information community to develop CREC as a NISO Recommended Practice,”
added Todd Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director. “The project is a direct
outcome of our 2021 NISO Plus conference, at which addressing the problems
with signaling retracted status of research was one of three that attendees
deemed to be of greatest importance. A CREC Working Group has now been
formed, with members from across the information community — librarians,
publishers, service providers, and of course Professor Schneider. We look
forward to working with them all on this important initiative.  We are
extremely grateful to the Sloan Foundation for their support to help speed
the advancement of this project.”

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 lifecycle of information
standards. NISO is a nonprofit association accredited by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI).

For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact
us at [log in to unmask]

About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit, mission-driven
grantmaking institution dedicated to improving the welfare of all through
the advancement of scientific knowledge. Established in 1934 by Alfred
Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the
General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in four broad
areas: direct support of research in science, technology, engineering,
mathematics, and economics; initiatives to increase the quality, equity,
diversity, and inclusiveness of scientific institutions and the science
workforce; projects to develop or leverage technology to empower research;
and efforts to enhance and deepen public engagement with science and
scientists.

https://sloan.org

About UIUC

The School of Information Sciences <https://ischool.illinois.edu>, the
iSchool at Illinois, is dedicated to shaping the future of information
through education, research, and engagement. The iSchool is home to
world-class faculty who deliver a high-quality academic experience through
programs consistently ranked highly by U.S. News & World Report. Its global
research partnerships bring together multidisciplinary experts to address
current challenges in the field, and its research projects secure grants
from some of the nation’s most prestigious funders. Researchers in the
iSchool address contemporary information issues in areas such as data
science, human computer interaction, digital libraries, privacy and
security, artificial intelligence, bio- and health-informatics, information
literacy, library practice and policy, cultural analytics, and youth
literature, culture, and services. NISO

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 302

Baltimore, MD 21211

Phone: 301.654.2512 E-mail: [log in to unmask]



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