OSAC Registry of Forensic Science Standards
Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Access and status
Cost
Partly free
Part of it is free and part is not. The entry says which part; read that before you plan around it.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
A NIST-administered repository of forensic science standards that have passed technical and quality review by practitioners, researchers, statisticians and legal experts, and been approved by a two-thirds vote of the relevant OSAC subcommittee and the Forensic Science Standards Board. It lists both standards published by external standards development organisations and OSAC Proposed Standards awaiting SDO publication, spanning 24 disciplines.
Who it is for, and when
Check the Registry before asserting that a method is or is not consistent with accepted forensic standards — it is the closest thing the US has to a curated, vetted list. Labs use it to choose which standards to adopt; lawyers use it to test an expert's claim that their practice follows a recognised standard.
What it does not cover
Registry listing is not accreditation, certification or a legal requirement, and a method's absence is not evidence it is unsound. Access is mixed rather than uniformly free: OSAC's own proposed standards are free, ASTM documents need a free account, and other SDO-published standards follow that publisher's terms.
Go to the source
Open at nist.gov (opens in a new tab)https://www.nist.gov/osac/osac-registry
Details
- Type
- Standard or guidance
- Written for
- Working examinerLawyers and courtsWorking examiner, Lawyers and courts
- Publisher
- Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science, National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Topics
- standards-development, lab-accreditation, quality-assurance, legal-admissibility, us-federal
- Checked at source
- Standards are revised. Confirm the current revision with the publisher before citing this.
Related entries
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A CFTT offshoot that packages NIST's test methodology so labs can run it themselves and optionally share results: distributed as bootable Linux ISOs and a portable Windows web-server build, with report templates. Current suites cover disk imaging, forensic media preparation, hardware write blocking, string searching, SQLite recovery, mobile device acquisition and cloud data extraction, with companion datasets in CFReDS.
The statutory code of practice the Forensic Science Regulator is required to publish under the Forensic Science Regulator Act 2021, setting quality standard requirements for forensic science activities relating to the investigation of crime in England and Wales. Version 2 replaced version 1 and came into force on 2 October 2025.
ISO/IEC 17025 — General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories
PaywalledThe 30-page accreditation standard against which forensic laboratories, including digital forensics units, are assessed for technical competence, impartiality and consistent operation. The third edition (2017) replaced the 2005 edition and was confirmed on systematic review in 2023.
A law review article by a federal judge who writes extensively on digital evidence, the Reporter to the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, and a leading evidence practitioner, written as Rules 902(13) and 902(14) were being adopted. It works through the authentication routes for electronic evidence and explains what the new self-authentication provisions were designed to do.