One important reason for securing copyright protection, he says, is to maintain the integrity and reliability of the data in the SRD databases. This doesn’t usually happen with government work, Hanisch points out. The 1968 Standard Reference Data Act allowed SRD databases to be copyrighted both domestically and internationally. NIST provides 49 free SRD databases and 14 fee-based SRD databases. Like SRMs, SRD may be purchased, with the price set to cover the costs of producing, collecting and disseminating the data. Does it fit with known physics? Does it have a properly characterized uncertainty? Some set of expert eyes has looked at all of the information in SRD.” “So if there's a data point in a standard reference database, somebody has looked at it. “It's very, very carefully vetted for quality,” said Hanisch. Last but not least, the data is critically evaluated to verify its reliability. It’s related to a measurable physical or chemical property of a substance or system of substances. Standard reference data has several key characteristics. “If you don’t properly know its expansion coefficients, for example, then the bridge you build may fail in a catastrophic way,” says Robert Hanisch, the director of NIST’s SRD program. For example, SRD can characterize the properties of structural steel.
