4 Conventions

This Code of Practice for Research Data is implemented using the following convention:

The keywords “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “RECOMMENDED”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119: Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt, 1997).

Note that the force of these words is modified by the requirement level of the document in which they are used.

  • “MUST” (or “REQUIRED”) means that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.

  • “MUST NOT” means that the definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.

  • “RECOMMENDED” means that there may be valid reasons in certain circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications should be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

  • “NOT RECOMMENDED” means that there may be valid reasons in certain circumstances when the particular behaviour is acceptable or even useful, but the full implications should be understood, and the case carefully weighed before implementing any behavior described with this label.

Content providers implementing the Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics who feel they have a valid disagreement with a requirement of the code are requested to contact the authors and ask for clarification on interpretation of the code.

Terms appearing in italics represent variables that will be replaced with appropriate values at implementation time, for example “Error_Number : Error_Description” might resolve to “3040 : Partial Usage Available”.