NISO’s CREC Recommended Practice Wins 2026 SSP EPIC Gold Award for Integrity Tools
Chula Vista CA | May 29, 2026—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 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 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.
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 life cycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.
About SSP
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), founded in 1978, is a nonprofit organization formed to promote and advance communication among all sectors of the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field.
