As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there’s ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it’s not clear on publishers’ sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or flagged. (That is one of the main reasons we created our database, which now contains more than 30,000 retractions.)
The U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) project would like to make things better. We spoke to Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director in Baltimore, Maryland, about the new project, which aims to address the lack of visibility of notices added to published papers.
Retraction Watch (RW): You recently launched the ‘Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern’ project. Why did you do this, and what do you hope to achieve?
Todd Carpenter (TC): This was a topic that was selected for a discussion at the NISO plus conference. As part of our model for the conference, we use it to generate discussion around topics of interest for the community and then we generate ideas. From there, we vet those ideas and determine projects that are of most interest to the broadest set of constituents and that are most likely something that NISO can achieve, and do so in a reasonable time, and have the greatest impact.
And retractions were one of the most interesting ideas coming out of the conference. There was the most kind of buzz and communication and discussion around it, and our leadership committees after the conference decided that it was one of the three ideas that we would be pushing forward out of the conference for further work.
It is a critically important issue. Trust in scholarly communications, and the scientific process that it represents, is what makes scholarly publishing different from other forms of publishing. We see this as there being a problem with retracted science and the communication about retracted status. We hope to, through this process, improve the ecosystem awareness of retracted status.
RW: What makes this necessary given that PubMed and Crossref already have guidelines for what to submit, and publishers routinely ignore them? How will your initiative change that?
TC: What we hope to do is several things. The first is to establish and improve the metadata conveying retracted information that publishers can then embed in the article metadata that is shared in the ecosystem, either with PubMed, CrossRef or other service providers.
In addition to this, we hope to improve the signaling to the user community. So, how should retracted information be displayed to the user on a publisher site? We want to establish some best practice of whom the retracted information is shared with; about who the retracted decision is sent to; and what people who receive that information should do with it.
We also want to look at not just the retracted paper, but the related research objects to whatever was retracted. For example, a data set might be in a data repository that is hosted by some other company. It’s possible that someone might find errors in the dataset, and withdraw or mark as some reason for concern about this dataset but that might not get communicated to the publisher who published the paper that is reliant on the associated data set.
RW: Most of what you’ve said relates to retractions. But where do corrections, withdrawals, removals and expressions of concern come into this?
TC: I think there needs to be a better, industry-standard vocabulary for what is meant by all of those things. People have different understandings of the different terminology. So establishing a standard terminology is another part of this project.
RW: There is ample evidence that retracted papers continue to be cited after being pulled. Will your project aim to address that issue?
TC: If a paper is withdrawn or retracted or there was some expression of concern about a paper, what the subsequent citing paper does is up to the editorial decision of that subsequent publisher.
We may or may not issue guidance on this; some of the scope of the work is defined by the working group once it’s formed. From my understanding, we want to be narrowly focused on the system and the ecosystem of what information is shared; how we define that information; and what sort of schemas and interchange in the community is necessary to communicate this information.
What someone does with the information that the ecosystem is sharing is also out of scope. As long as we make the awareness and the ecosystem better, that is where our project is going to stop.
RW: What’s ahead for the initiative? What will happen in the coming 18 to 24 months?
TC: We’re in the process of gathering expressions of interest for working group participants. We will then be vetting that working group, ensuring that there’s balance between the stakeholders. Participation is open to non-members. Although non-member participation in NISO projects is governed. There are limits in terms of how much a non member can participate.
From there the working group membership will be approved and we’ll get started. Working groups start with a data-gathering phase, so they go out and explore current best practice: who’s doing what; where are people storing these metadata already; how can we build on existing systems and infrastructure.
From there, the working group will start to codify definitions and best practices and defining schemas, etc. Hopefully 18 months from now, they’ll issue a public draft for comment. So the public will have an opportunity to review any potential recommendations and make comments on it. The working group is required to respond to all comments. And, depending on how long that comment process takes, we’ll then issue a final recommendation.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
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It is good to see the efforts to standardize how scientists treat retracted papers. Perhaps we should also be asking all scientific journals to be checking reference lists of all submitted papers for cites to papers that have been retracted. Commercial for-profit publishers could certainly afford to do this…
If there was a gold standard retracted paper database that everyone acknowledged as such that could serve as the tool for editorial checking, this might be a way to stamp out the continuing practice of citing work that has been retracted for being scientifically substandard or dishonest.
Like this one? http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx? 🙂