Nettie Lagace
Associate Executive Director
National Information Standards Organization
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)’s voting members recently approved several new projects that indicate the need to address trust in information infrastructure, and NISO working groups will be including this critical element in their discussions and eventual output. This briefing will describe the proposals and next steps for two projects, “Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC)” and “Integrating Publisher and Repository Workflows to Improve Data-Article Links” which were approved in late September, after cross-stakeholder groups continued discussions begun at the February NISO Plus conference to flesh out the specific problems in these spaces and determine practical steps that NISO working groups could take on. Both projects will publish NISO Recommended Practices to guide actions in their spaces. Where research outputs are retracted from the scholarly record, it is imperative that the scholarly communications ecosystem develop shared mechanisms (metadata elements and relationships) to signal awareness of these actions, so that end-users do not inadvertently propagate unsupported or fabricated data and damage trust in research. In the other project, as research datasets are published in repositories and research articles are published in scholarly journals, the act of associating these research objects is often ineffective and inefficient; associations are lost or imprecise, making meaning more vague or impossible. The NISO project will endeavor to define a machine-readable standard to track data during its lifetime and inform parties of relevant events, thereby improving transparency between research data creation and its use.
http://www.niso.org/press-releases/2021/09/niso-voting-members-approve-work-recommended-practice-retracted-research
https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/25898/
https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/26046/