British Standards

Products are commonly specified as meeting a particular British Standard, and in general, this can be done without any certification or independent testing.

PAS documents are a flexible and rapid standards development model open to all organizations.

Once published by BSI, a PAS has all the functionality of a British Standard for the purposes of creating schemes such as management systems and product benchmarks as well as codes of practice.

However, according to BSI, not all PAS documents are structured as specifications and the term is now sufficiently well established not to require any further amplification.

British Standards, including European and international adoptions, are available in many university and public libraries that subscribe to the BSOL platform.

Librarians and lecturers at UK-based subscribing universities have full access rights to the collection while students can copy/paste and print but not download a standard.

The BSI Knowledge Centre in Chiswick, London can be contacted directly about viewing standards in their Members' Reading Room.