NISO Recommended Practice (RP)

NISO (the National Information Standards Organization) is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization, and it publishes two structurally different tiers of consensus document: full ANSI/NISO Standards and Recommended Practices. Both are developed through NISO working groups and public comment, and both are freely available on niso.org at no cost — unlike many other ANSI-accredited bodies’ publications. The difference is process weight and formal status, not subject-matter importance.

What distinguishes a Recommended Practice from a Standard

A full Standard must complete the entire ANSI-accredited due-process cycle, which includes a formal ballot of NISO’s Voting Members and carries de jure status; it is numbered in the ANSI/NISO Z39.xx series (for example, ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, CRediT). A Recommended Practice goes through NISO’s working-group drafting and open-comment process but is approved without that final Voting Member ballot — as NISO’s own guidance puts it, an RP project “does not have the same robust level of review and balloting as an official ANSI/NISO standard would, nor does it carry the same formality or its de jure status.” NISO uses the RP tier deliberately for areas of practice that are “too nascent to be ready for formal standardization,” where early formalization risks poor adoption or stifled iteration; a Recommended Practice lets a community test and refine a convention, with the option (not the obligation) of later elevating it to full standard status.

The RP-[number]-[year] numbering convention

Current NISO Recommended Practices are designated RP-[sequence number]-[year of that edition] — for example RP-9-2014, RP-16-2013, RP-19-2020, RP-22-2021. The sequence number identifies the practice itself and stays fixed across revisions; the year identifies the specific published edition. KBART illustrates this directly: it was first published as RP-9-2010, revised as RP-9-2014, and a further Phase III revision has circulated in draft under the same RP-9 sequence number. (NISO’s very first Recommended Practice series, launched in 2006, used an earlier year-first format — e.g. RP-2006-02 — before the organization settled on the current number-first convention; both forms are correct for the edition they describe, but current practice follows RP-[number]-[year].)

Why this tier matters for CRIS and identifier interoperability specifically

A disproportionate share of the infrastructure this cluster covers — discovery-service transparency, e-journal identification, access/license signaling, knowledge-base metadata exchange — is governed by Recommended Practices rather than full Standards. NISO RP-19-2020 (Open Discovery Initiative), RP-9-2014 (KBART), RP-16-2013 (PIE-J), and RP-22-2021 (ALI) are all examples a research-information-systems implementer is likely to encounter directly. Practically, this matters for two reasons: RPs revise on a shorter cycle than Standards (KBART’s three editions in roughly a decade is typical), and conformance claims should cite the specific edition (the full RP-xx-YYYY designation, not just the acronym) since the number alone does not disambiguate which year’s practice a given system implements.

For the persistent-identifier and machine-readable-scholarly-metadata layer this term sits alongside, see CASRAI’s entries on DOI, ORCID iD, ROR ID, and JATS XML, and the Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems cluster hub. The identifier crosswalk guide covers how several of these identifier schemes interoperate in practice.