NISO CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern)

Retraction notices have existed for decades, but for most of that time each publisher represented them differently — or not at all in machine-readable form — which meant a retracted paper could keep circulating, being cited, and being indexed as though nothing had changed, simply because the systems that surface it to readers had no reliable signal to act on. NISO’s CREC Recommended Practice (RP-45-2024) exists to close that gap by standardizing the metadata and display conventions publishers, platforms, and aggregators use to communicate a retraction, removal, or expression of concern.

Why CREC exists

The Recommended Practice responds directly to two converging pressures in scholarly publishing: retraction volume has grown substantially in recent years, including a rise in coordinated “mass retraction” events tied to paper mills and systematic research-integrity investigations, and the representation of retracted status across publishers, indexers, and platforms had been unclear and inconsistent enough that invalidated research kept being read, cited, and built on without readers or downstream systems reliably knowing its status. NISO’s own framing of the problem is that inconsistent representation of retracted status directly enables continued reliance on research that has already been formally withdrawn or flagged.

Development began following the 2021 NISO Plus conference, where the need for a shared standard was raised, and proceeded with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The NISO CREC Working Group that produced RP-45-2024 comprised more than two dozen participants representing publishers, technology vendors, researchers, and libraries. The draft went through open public comment before formal publication on June 27, 2024 (ISBN 978-1-950980-26-0; DOI 10.3789/niso-rp-45-2024). The practice has since been endorsed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) as guidance consistent with its own retraction principles.

What CREC actually specifies

CREC operates on two parallel tracks, and a full implementation addresses both:

Metadata (machine-readable)

The Recommended Practice defines metadata elements for the original publication, for the retraction/removal notice itself, and for expressions of concern — covering things like the type of notice, the date it was issued, and a reason where available — and classifies each element as Essential, Essential if Available, or Recommended. This is the part of CREC that lets a status change propagate automatically: once a publisher deposits corrected metadata (for example, to Crossref), any system that consumes that metadata — a citation database, a reference manager, a library discovery layer, an aggregator — can reflect the retracted or flagged status without a human at each downstream system separately noticing and updating a record. This is the same underlying principle behind CrossMark, which lets a reader check a PDF or web page against the publisher’s record of its current status; CREC standardizes what that status metadata should actually contain for retraction-type events specifically.

Display (human-readable)

CREC also specifies how the status should appear to a reader encountering the content directly, independent of whatever metadata a downstream system may or may not have consumed: prepending “RETRACTED:” to the article’s title, watermarking and clearly labelling both the HTML and PDF versions of the content, and ensuring the retraction, removal, or expression-of-concern notice itself is a distinct, easily located, and properly linked document — not a passing mention in an unrelated editorial note or a change that’s only visible in a table of contents.

How CREC relates to editorial retraction guidance

CREC is deliberately scoped as a communication standard, not an editorial-ethics standard. The decision of whether a paper should be retracted, corrected, or flagged with an expression of concern is governed by editorial-ethics guidance — principally COPE’s retraction guidelines — and remains an editorial judgment made by a journal, publisher, or institution. See CASRAI’s Retraction and Expression of concern entries for that editorial-decision side, and How to Write a Retraction Statement for the mechanics of drafting the notice text itself. CREC picks up only after that editorial decision has been made: it governs how the resulting notice and status get represented in metadata and on-page display so the decision actually reaches readers and systems reliably, rather than existing only as a notice someone has to happen upon.

Why this matters for research administrators and librarians

For anyone responsible for institutional repositories, library discovery layers, or citation-tracking workflows, CREC adoption by a publisher or platform is a practical signal: it indicates that retraction status is likely to propagate into the metadata your own systems ingest, rather than requiring manual cross-checking against retraction-watch-style databases. Conversely, a publisher or repository that has not implemented CREC-consistent metadata is a place where that automatic propagation cannot be assumed, and manual verification of an item’s current status remains necessary.