Standards IP and Participation Policy

• 1.1 This Policy applies to everyone who takes part in developing a Nexus Standard: contributors, working group participants, reviewers, editors and the organisations they represent (Participants). On Nexus Reports it applies to contributions that propose or apply a standard.
• 1.2 It complements the Contribution Terms, which govern copyright and the confirmation of rights for every contribution.

• 2.1 GCRI Canada is the Secretariat and publisher of record of the Nexus Standards and receives every disclosure and notice under this Policy.
• 2.2 GCRI Canada leads the public-good Nexus Consortium as Lead Institution, Consortium Secretariat and lead contracting organization. GRF and GRA retain independent institutional mandates as consortium stewards. Technology, infrastructure and service providers act at arm's length and have no control over institutional governance, research, publications, national priorities or customer, sovereign and community data.

• 3.1 The Nexus Standards are preparatory working drafts (2026). They are published for comment, testing and voluntary use, and they may change.
• 3.2 A Nexus Standard names external standards by identifier, body and link. It does not reproduce their text or stand in for them; each external standard stays with its steward and under its own licence.
• 3.3 National adoption, adaptation or reference of a Nexus Standard is a decision of the competent national institution under its own law.

• 4.1 A Participant discloses, as early as reasonably possible and in any case before the public last call of a draft, any patent or patent application it knows of, held by it or by others, that may contain claims necessarily infringed by implementing the draft.
• 4.2 A disclosure names the draft, the patent or application and its holder, and the part of the draft concerned. It is sent to contact@therisk.global and is published with the draft. No Participant is required to search patent records.

• 5.1 A Participant commits to license, on a royalty-free basis and on reasonable terms, any claims it holds that are necessarily infringed by implementing what a Nexus Standard requires. The commitment covers implementation of the standard only, and the detailed terms are those of the Contribution Terms.
• 5.2 During the last call of a draft, a Participant may exclude a named patent or application from its commitment by written notice. An exclusion is published with the draft, and the editors consider whether to change the draft.

• 6.1 The text, registries, schemas and data of the Nexus Standards are open (CC BY 4.0), and reference code is open (Apache-2.0), from the date each item is publicly released. The standards can be implemented without any proprietary software or service.
• 6.2 A tool, platform or service that implements a Nexus Standard is not part of the standard, and its terms are its own.

• 7.1 Conformance with a Nexus Standard is declared by the implementer in an implementation conformance statement with its evidence. A statement is listed as submitted; the programme does not verify or approve it, and it never becomes a certification.
• 7.2 An implementation may be described as conformant on the strength of its own statement only, never as approved or vouched for by the programme.

• 8.1 Participants do not discuss or agree prices, costs, wages, bids, markets, customers, output or any other competitively sensitive matter, and do not exchange such information. This applies equally to meetings of the industry councils of Global Risk Alliance and to every working group, call and event of the programme.
• 8.2 Every meeting has a written agenda circulated in advance and minutes that record what was discussed. A participant who sees a discussion turn to a competitively sensitive matter objects, has the objection minuted and, if the discussion continues, leaves.
• 8.3 Participation is open on non-discriminatory terms, decisions are recorded with their reasons and recorded dissent, and no standard may be used to exclude a competitor or a technology without technical justification.

• 9.1 This Policy are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules that would apply another law.
• 9.2 Disclosures, exclusion notices and questions go to contact@therisk.global.

• GatewayGW-GCRISend it from this pageEvidence, a correction, a case, a method, a review, a translation or profile input. It arrives tagged with this page, so the editor who owns it receives it.
• ZenodoOpen depositDeposit it and submit to the communityPublish your own record on Zenodo with your ORCID iD, then submit it to the Nexus Reports community. Curators review it there; the DOI stays yours.
• Nexus ReportsGCRISee every way to contributeThe contribution types, how each is reviewed, what credit you receive, the licence and what is never accepted.

Never send personal data, sensitive infrastructure detail or anything you have no right to share. A contribution is reviewed before use; sending it confers no authorship or editorial rights, and sponsorship never buys a finding.