Research, academia and education: standards that apply
The 6 standards listed for research, academia and education in the registry, each with its status, UNI (Unique Nexus Identifier) and the rules stated in its text.
- Nexus Standards: NS-0, NS-1, NS-2, NS-4, NS-8, NS-12.
- Open standards: DataCite Metadata Schema 4.5; ORCID identifier; Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier; FAIR Guiding Principles; CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance; CodeMeta; Citation File Format 1.2; SoftWare Hash IDentifier (SWHID); PROV-O: The PROV Ontology.
- Data and feeds: OpenAlex scholarly graph; DataCite metadata (REST API); ROR data dump; UIS data browser (education, R&D).
- Couples with: International organisations and multilaterals; For STEM communities; the Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI Canada) evidence pathway; Public sector and government.
- Nexus Standards
- 6
- NS-0, NS-1, NS-2
- Open standards
- 9
- named, never copied
- Data and feeds
- 4
- listed for reference
- Couplings
- 4
- with other areas
Constitution and principles
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000004.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS0-P1 | Open · The standards, their registries, schemas, catalogues and reference tools are published in the canonical repository under the licences recorded in LICENSING.md. Participation in development is open to every community and stakeholder under GOVERNANCE.md. No standard depends on a proprietary artefact, product, account or mark to be applied. |
NS0-P2 | Machine-readable first · Every normative element exists as data (registry, schema, clause) before it exists as prose; prose explains, data governs. A standard with no machine form is not a Nexus Standard. |
NS0-P3 | Identified · Every artefact, record, deployment, policy and clause carries a UNI (NS-1, NS-3, NS-9). Nothing is cited by a name alone. |
NS0-P4 | Verified, not asserted · Conformance is a claim with evidence: receipts, digests, signed attestations and observations (NS-11). A claim without evidence is recorded as a claim, never as a fact, and the supported claim level of the implementation bounds every statement it makes. |
NS0-P5 | Zero trust · Authenticated is not authorised; entitled is not authorised; access is denied by default. Every verification, monitoring and enforcement path assumes no implicit trust between systems, tenants, sites or agents, and records who verified what under which mandate. |
NS0-P6 | Real-time · Standards express obligations that can be evaluated continuously against live records (observations, releases, corrections, deployments), and the standards themselves are versioned so that an implementation can state exactly which version it conforms to at any instant. |
NS0-P7 | Provenance everywhere · Every artefact records what it was derived from, who produced it, under which release and policy decision, and what corrected it (NS-3b, PROV-O profile). Corrections supersede; nothing is silently rewritten. |
NS0-P8 | Honest · A UNI identifies and resolves; it never certifies. legalState defaults to review-required. Readiness, approval and production status are never implied by a standard, a status, a page, a score or a badge. |
NS0-P9 | Nexus-aware · Standards address cross-domain interdependence (water, energy, food, health, biodiversity, climate and the sectors they touch) explicitly: an obligation can reference artefacts in another domain, and cascades are first-class. |
NS0-P10 | Names are governed · Codes are never names. Public names follow the marks policy (governance/OPEN_BOUNDARY_IPR_AND_LICENSING.md, section 7). A system or component is shown by its neutral display name and its UNI; the UNI may change with context (NS-9), and no name infringes anyone’s mark. |
NS0-P11 | Community-owned development · Proposals, comments, decisions and versions of every standard are themselves artefacts with UNIs. The development process is specified (NS-13) and open, and authority to adopt is recorded, never assumed. |
NS0-P12 | Fail closed · Missing evidence, a missing legal state, a missing policy decision or unavailable verification results in a refusal with a typed reason, never in a pass. |
The UNI and the artefact catalogue (grammar v0.2: domain, sector, region and environment segments)
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000001.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS1-R1 | One UNI shall identify one artefact concept; versions share the UNI and differ in @VERSION. |
NS1-R2 | UNIs shall be allocated only through a catalogue (mint) or a record allocation authority (NS-3); they shall not be typed by hand. |
NS1-R3 | UNIs shall not be deleted or reused. A withdrawn artefact keeps its record (WITHDRAWN); a replaced one records supersededBy. |
NS1-R4 | Every record shall carry the required metadata; legalState defaults to review-required; claimCeiling stays inside the claim registry. |
NS1-R5 | The UNI shall be embedded in the artefact itself so that machines and people can find the record (section 6). |
NS1-R6 | A regional artefact shall carry REGION; public regional or national use still follows the geographic rules of the marks policy. |
NS1-R7 | Codes are classification and shall not be used as product names. |
NS1-R8 | A new scope, domain, sector or environment code shall meet the allocation rules CA-1 to CA-10 (section 1.1) and shall enter through an NS-13 proposal. |
NS1-R9 | A code shall not be reassigned or deleted; a retired code is deprecated with supersededBy, and identifiers that use it remain valid. |
NS1-R10 | A PROPOSED identifier may be used and shall be shown with its status until the registry change is adopted. |
Citation and attribution format for UNIs
Status proposed · trust, authorisation and assurance; knowledge, records and learning · NXS-STD-ST-000009.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS2-R1 | Every citation of an artefact or record identified by a UNI shall carry its UNI; a name alone does not cite. |
NS2-R2 | A claim about one version shall cite that version; a citation of the concept shall be explicit. |
NS2-R3 | Attribution shall follow the record: the publisher of record is credited, and agents are credited as agents. |
NS2-R4 | A derived work shall cite the UNIs of its sources; the omission of a source is a provenance defect, not a matter of style. |
NS2-R5 | Citations shall resolve: the resolver (NS-7) or a DOI shall answer for every cited UNI. |
Structure and drafting of Nexus Standards and documents (v0.2: clause structure, verbal forms, registered requirements; document front matter)
Status proposed · knowledge, records and learning · NXS-STD-ST-000010.
NS-4 states its requirements in sections rather than in a table of rules.
Zenodo publishing workflow with legal gate, DOI write-back, Software Heritage archival
Status open · trust, authorisation and assurance · UNI not yet allocated.
NS-8 is specified elsewhere: OPEN.
Software, model and AI/ML artefacts (supply chain, model cards, dataset sheets)
Status proposed · software, models and capability lifecycle; trust, authorisation and assurance · NXS-STD-ST-000012.
| Rule | Text |
|---|---|
NS12-R1 | Each software release shall carry a bill of materials, a build attestation and signatures as evidence of the UNI version. |
NS12-R2 | Each model shall carry a model card and each dataset a dataset sheet; both shall cite their sources by UNI. |
NS12-R3 | Agents shall act under recorded mandates and shall be credited as agents; they shall not adopt or certify. |
NS12-R4 | AI governance obligations shall be clauses bound to contextual UNIs and evaluated, not prose assurances. |
Questions and answers.
Are these all the rules for research, academia and education?
What does a rule identifier such as NS1-R5 denote?
Around research, academia and education.
Shape the standards for research, academia and education.
Governments, regulators, standards bodies, industry, academia and communities are invited to shape the catalogue ahead of its first official release, targeted for 2030: comment on a draft, propose a change, join a working group or host a field exercise.
Status and use. The Nexus Standards are proposed standards developed through an open process under NS-13 and published for voluntary use; they do not constitute certification, accreditation or regulatory approval, and adoption remains a decision of the Global Standards Council and, in each country, of its National Standards Council. A UNI (Unique Nexus Identifier) identifies an artefact; it does not certify it. Names of standards bodies and their standards belong to their stewards and are used only to identify the documents; no text of an external standard is reproduced here. Nexus Standards is not affiliated with, endorsed by or certified by any standards body named here.
Licences: CC BY 4.0 for standards text, registries, schemas and data; Apache-2.0 for reference code. External standards are cited by name, number and link under their own licences. Third-party data, libraries and fonts keep their own licences: see Third-party notices.