Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A library-systems or serials-management procurement document from the 2013–mid-2010s era that cites "NISO RP-17-2013" and requires vendor systems to represent institutional subscribers via an ISNI — the Recommended Practice named Ringgold and Bowker as the first ISNI Registration Agencies able to register institutions.
- Is an instance
An organization's ISNI record used to identify it in a scholarly-communications workflow (for example, a publisher licensing or subscription system) — the outcome the I² Working Group's guidance was designed to enable, achieved through ISNI rather than through a separate I²-specific identifier.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A ROR ID (https://ror.org/...) is not an I2 identifier. ROR is a separate, actively governed registry launched in January 2019 by a collaboration including California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science, and has become the identifier funders, publishers, and CRIS systems actually require for institutional affiliation — it was not built on, and is not a successor project of, the NISO I2 initiative.
- Not an instance
ISNI (ISO 27729) itself is not I2. ISNI is the still-active, independently governed identifier standard that the I2 Working Group recommended institutions use; I2 is the NISO working group and its Recommended Practice document, not an identifier or registry in its own right.
Editorial commentary
The NISO Institutional Identifiers (I²) Working Group was established by the National Information Standards Organization in 2008 to address a real gap in the scholarly-communications supply chain: no consistent way to identify the organizational parties — institutions, publishers, funders, libraries — transacting with each other, distinct from person-level identifiers such as author names.
Rather than create a new identifier syntax, the I² Working Group’s investigation converged on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI, ISO 27729), which was already an approved international standard with an established registration-agency infrastructure. The group’s output, published 5 April 2013 as NISO RP-17-2013: Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain, is a Recommended Practice — not a full ANSI/NISO standard — that specifies the minimum metadata needed to identify an organization and gives guidance for institutions, and for prospective ISNI Registration Agencies, applying ISNI to institutional records. The Recommended Practice names Ringgold and Bowker as the first ISNI Registration Agencies for institutions.
Current status: dormant. NISO’s own working-group page shows no activity beyond the 2013 Recommended Practice, and the group does not appear to have reconvened since. I² never created or maintained a registry of its own — it pointed institutions toward ISNI’s existing infrastructure — and in the years since, a different identifier has become the one research funders, publishers, and CRIS systems actually require: the Research Organization Registry (ROR), a free, community-governed registry launched in January 2019 by a collaboration including California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and Digital Science. ROR was not built on I² and was not positioned by NISO as its successor; it emerged independently and won the adoption that I²’s Recommended Practice had hoped ISNI-for-institutions would achieve in the research sector specifically.
For CASRAI’s purposes, I² is documented here as historical context in the identifier landscape, not as current practice to implement. A new institutional-identification workflow in research administration today should use ROR; where an ISNI is separately required (for example, in library or publishing-supply-chain contexts outside research administration), it should be obtained directly rather than via I² guidance that is now over a decade old and unmaintained. See also the identifier crosswalk entry and the Identifier Crosswalk guide for how DOI, ORCID, ROR, and institutional identifiers relate in current practice.
Also known as
I2 · NISO I2 · Institutional Identifiers (I2) · ANSI/NISO RP-17-2013 · NISO I2 Working Group
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="NISO Institutional Identifier (I2)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/niso-institutional-identifier-i2" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/niso-institutional-identifier-i2",
"name": "NISO Institutional Identifier (I2)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/niso-institutional-identifier-i2",
"description": "A now-inactive NISO initiative (2008–2013) whose output, ANSI/NISO RP-17-2013, is a Recommended Practice for identifying organizations in the scholarly information supply chain. It did not define a new identifier syntax of its own; instead it specified how to apply the existing ISNI standard (ISO 27729) to institutions. The working group has not been active since publishing the Recommended Practice in 2013, and I2 has no ongoing registry of its own — in current research-infrastructure practice, ROR is the identifier institutions actually register for and that funders, publishers, and CRIS systems require.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/niso-institutional-identifier-i2",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/institutional-identifiers",
"I2",
"NISO I2",
"Institutional Identifiers (I2)",
"ANSI/NISO RP-17-2013",
"NISO I2 Working Group"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"dateModified": "2026-07-16T07:40:47",
"inLanguage": "en"
}
