Cooperation in publicly funded reference material production

In the following text, the terms RM and CRM will be used extensively to describe the main product(s) of RM producers, together with relevant RM documentation, e.g. RM reports and certificates that accompany CRMs [1]. The terms RM and CRM are defined in ISO Guide 30:2015 as follows: “A RM is a material sufficiently homogeneous and stable with respect to one or more specified properties, which has been established to be fit for its intended use in a measurement process”; “A CRM is a RM characterized by a metrologically valid procedure for one or more specified properties, accompanied by a certificate that provides the value of the specified property, its associated uncertainty and a statement of metrological traceability” [2]. RM is the superordinate term, while CRM is a subordinate having a certified value and making it suitable for trueness checks. Metrological traceability is defined as a property of a measurement result whereby the result can be related to a reference through a documented unbroken chain of calibrations, each contributing to the measurement uncertainty [3]. For the remainder of this report, the publicly funded RM producers will simply be denoted “public RM producers”.