NISO Recommended Practice Named a Finalist for the 2026 SSP EPIC Awards

We are pleased to share that NISO’s Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-2024) is a 2026 SSP EPIC Award finalist in the Research Integrity Tools category. The EPIC Award winners will be announced at the SSP Annual Meeting, hosted at the Gaylord Pacific Hotel and Resort in Chula Vista, California, on May 28.

The CREC Recommended Practice establishes best practices for the creation, transfer, and display of retraction-related metadata, ensuring that participants (publishers, aggregators, full-text hosts, libraries, and researchers) can communicate retraction information quickly and enabling readers who discover a publication to readily identify its status. Published in 2024 and developed and maintained by a group of dedicated volunteers, CREC is an important tool for organizations working to promote transparency in the scholarly record.

“We are incredibly excited to be an SSP EPIC Awards finalist,” said Keondra Bailey, NISO Standards Program Manager. “The NISO CREC Recommended Practice is a thorough, well-considered framework for strengthening metadata and supporting research integrity. Congratulations to the CREC Working Group and Standing Committee members on a job well done!"

Funding for the CREC Working Group as well as for research at the University of Illinois’ Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS) project, which aided Working Group deliberations and decisions, was generously provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

The NISO CREC Recommended Practice is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec.