ISO/TR
Technical Report

An informative document containing information of a different kind from that normally published in a normative document.

The way it is done

When a committee has collected information in support of an approved work item or work items, it may decide, by simple majority vote of the P-members, to request that the information be published in the form of a technical report. The ISO Secretary-General, if necessary in consultation with the Technical Management Board, shall decide whether to publish the document as a technical report.

ISO Technical Reports were essentially of three types: type 1 for documents which had been intended to become standards but for which the required levels of agreement could not be attained, type 2 to describe either the directions of standardization in particular fields or in some instances to make available an experimental standard for trial use, and type 3 which was for information only. In future, the term ISO technical report will be retained purely for informative documents (i.e. the current type 3 technical reports). Normative technical reports (types 1 and 2) will in future be published as technical specifications (TS).