CREC Takes Gold at the 2026 SSP EPIC Awards in Chula Vista
We are pleased to announce that NISO’s Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-2024) has received the 2026 SSP EPIC Gold Award for Excellence in the Integrity Tools category. The EPIC Award winners were announced at the Gaylord Pacific Hotel and Resort in Chula Vista, California, on May 28 during the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting. The awards recognize and celebrate remarkable teams and individuals in the publishing, information technology, and communications sectors for their significant contributions to scholarly communication through innovation, creativity, and dedication.
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.
“NISO is delighted to receive this prestigious award,” said NISO Executive Director Todd Carpenter. “We hope this recognition will lead to even wider adoption of the CREC Recommended Practice in the scholarly communications community. Congratulations to the dedicated members of our CREC Working Group and Standing Committee, who have worked so hard to develop, maintain, and promote these practices supporting research integrity.”
NISO also thanks the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which generously provided funding for the CREC Working Group and for research at the University of Illinois’ Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS) project, which aided Working Group deliberations and decisions.
The NISO CREC Recommended Practice is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/crec.