Funding: NISO and UIUC Awarded Sloan Grant for Work to Prevent the Spread of Retracted Research

From a Joint News Release via National Information Standards Organization (NISO):

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that enable publishers, preprint repositories, and discovery services to identify and signal that a publication has been retracted or has expressions of concern.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.

“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.”  

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