Information Standards in Practice

NISO and ISO information standards and recommended practices have been adopted by hundreds of organizations all over the world, including the examples on this page — please contact us so that we can share yours too!

Several NISO standards or recommended practices have registries or other publicly available lists of implementers. Those marked * below require a formal application and/or validation process.

Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT): Publishing organizations, institutions, and third-party/vendor organizations that have implemented the taxonomy. 

KBART Registry*: List of contact information for content providers and knowledge base suppliers, identifying KBART-endorsed organizations.

NISO SERU Registry*: Intended to help publishers and libraries identify interest in using NISO’s Shared Electronic Resource Understanding Recommended Practice for electronic resources.

ODI Conformance Statements*: Completed conformance statements for libraries, content providers, and discovery service providers. Recordings of recent ODI conformance workshops for content providers and for libraries are openly available.

Seamless Access*: Service providers with live implementations of Seamless Access at Limited, Standard, and Advanced levels.

Transfer Code of Practice*: A list of publishers that have endorsed the Code, and will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that any journal transfers in which they are involved are consistent with it.

Examples of information standards adoption by individual NISO member organizations and others include:

• The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is one of the most widely used NISO standards. Here are just a few of the organizations that have adopted it:
  • NISO member Highwire Press  explains its JCORE platform upgrade to JATS XML1.3       
  • Inera (an Atypon company) has two “off-the-shelf” implementations of its desktop eXtyles system that are designed for organizations that need JATS or STS XML as a primary output (eXtyles JATS and eXtyles STS), and their eXtyles Arc solution also outputs JATS XML       
  • eLife has a JATS schematron     
  • SciELO explained its adoption of JATS in this 2014 blog post, Why XML?
• JATS for Reuse (JATS4R), which builds on JATS, is a popular set of NISO Recommended Practices used, among others, in Inera’s Edifix product — see its JATS4R preprints citation recommendations
• The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Recommended Practice has been implemented by NISO member Wiley, who created this web page to explain organizational discovery practices, highlight useful resources, and share this ODI conformance checklist
• The Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) Recommended Practice, was first implemented by eLife using this javascript package, as mentioned in this blog post
• ISO standard 25964 for Thesauri and Interoperability with other Vocabularies was used by member organization ITHAKA to ensure the JSTOR Thesaurus was consistent, extensible, and interoperable
• NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) and Z39.50 are just two of the standards implemented by Auto-Graphics — learn more on this standards page

Want to cite a standard?

NISO publications are all assigned identifiers (in standards parlance, designations), which are used when citing a standard. They provide details to uniquely distinguish the work and supply information on its up-to-date-ness. For ease of reading, they are not included here, but they are accessible via the links for individual NISO standards on our standards and publications page. 

Want an overview of standards in publishing systems?

Check out this great eight-part webinar series on Standardizing Standards: Publishing with STS, eXtyles, and Typefi, a co-production of NISO member organizations Inera (members through Atypon, its parent company) and Typefi.

Want some light reading on standards?

Find out what our NISO Plus scholarship winners told us when we asked them: If You Were An Information Standard, Which One Would You Be?; and If You Were An Information Standard, Which One Would Your Be (2022 Edition).

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