VITA Standards Access Questions

VITA's goal is to foster wide spread acceptance of our standards. As such, VITA has long held a very liberal stance on the use of the PDF files of published standards. Below are answers to common questions regarding use of VITA standards.

• Can employees of member companies who do not have a profile on www.vita.com have access to published VITA standards?

• Can contractors and test houses working for a member company but who are not members of VITA themselves be provided copies of standards for use on a project for a member company?
• What if I find an error or ambiguous section in a published VITA standard?
  

Employees of VITA Member Companies

Every member company of VITA has free access to download all published VITA standards from www.vita.com/Standards.  These standards may be used by any employee of the member company, regardless if they have a login profile on www.vita.com or not.  Many companies place the standards on a server to act as a library for their employees. There are no Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues with providing standards to employees of member companies in this manner. The only requirement is that employees not take digital copies of these standards with them should they leave employment with the member company.

Contractors and Test Houses

Contractors working for a member company are allowed to have copies of VITA standards provided to them by the member company.  Contractors are not allowed to propagate the provided standards to other organizations, nor use them during projects for non-VITA-member companies.  Similarly,  we allow members to provide external testing labs access to our standards to facilitate testing with the same limitations.  We do expect our members to be judicious in only providing contractors and testing houses with access to those specific standards required for the effort.  For example, we would expect environmental test houses to be provided access to VITA 47 type environmental standards but not standards not associated with their testing efforts.

A key benefit of having a contractor or test house purchase standards themselves from our external store (www.vita.com/Standards) is that they will automatically receive updates to standards they have purchased once they are published.

Report Possible Errors in Standards

VITA Working Groups and Staff strive to ensure our published standards are error-free.  However, at times, some mistakes are inevitable.  If you feel that there is a mistake in a standard, or if there is an ambiguity that needs to be addressed, please send an email to executive.director@vita.com

If you have additional questions, please send them to executive.director@vita.com