Approval of Proposed New Work Item: Trust Markers (ITEM)

This ballot is to approve a proposed new work item to create aNISO Recommended Practice for identification of trust markers for increasing credibility and trust in research.

Ethics and integrity cases in submitted manuscripts are becoming an increasingly common problem, whilst retractions continue to grow at a rapid rate. These cases are caused by intentional misconduct and fraud, as well as a host of unintentional poor research practices. Most good journals undertake a range of checks to identify these issues ahead of peer review and publication. However, the specific checks that are undertaken are highly variable and typically not shared on a journal site, whilst most preprint servers conduct far more limited checks. This means that the specific checks that have been conducted and passed are unclear to the reader, especially for those that are unfamiliar with different scholarly publishing mechanisms and terminology, and that are consuming different types of content across a wide range of sites on the Internet.
 
The goal of this project will be to produce a NISO Recommended Practice (RP). This RP will provide consumers of scholarly content (with a focus on articles but irrespective of type of venue of publication, e.g. across preprint servers, journals) with necessary definitions and a framework for understanding items that would signal trust in published scholarly content.