Perspectives on Trust Markers for Publishing

Session Description

Trust markers – tools to verify information and support research integrity – are increasingly being used in scholarly communications as a way to help readers and other users to evaluate the legitimacy of content, authors, funding, and more. This session will present and discuss different approaches to establishing trust markers for published research that can serve as a guide for the research community and the public alike. The speakers will provide an update on work to establish a NISO Recommended Practice for trust markers, and share some examples of existing markers. For example, ORCID's Trust Markers help to enhance data quality and trust within ORCID records by signifying the provenance of data shared by ORCID members -- this makes it easier to identify and assess authoritative sources and data. Another example is PKP’s recently-launched Publication Facts Label (currently available to journals using its OJS platform), which borrows from the Nutrition Facts Label. It presents information drawn directly from the publishing platform, demonstrating article- and journal-level compliance with scholarly publishing standards, such as the number of peer reviewers, and time to publication. The panel will discuss the importance of industry-wide standardization of trust markers and the opportunities and challenges of achieving this. The audience will be invited to share their own experiences and their feedback.