This episode three of the Improving the System season of the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Justice Science podcast series is an interview with John Paul Jones and Mark Stolorow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) about the Organization of Scientific Area Communities for Forensic Science (OSAC).
The interview notes that the 2008 National Academy of Sciences report on forensic science cited a lack of national leadership on scientifically sound standards. The authors of this report specifically recommended that NIST bridge these gaps in forensic sciences. The presented interview discusses developing standards and the creation of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science (OSAC). In responding to the National Academy of Sciences concern about the lack of standards for various forensic science procedures, NIST created OSAC to lead in the development of standards for forensic science processes. OSAC does not produce forensic science standards, but rather provides leadership in assessing and approving standards developed by various organizations involved in creating standards for a specific forensic discipline. There are currently just over 200 standards in the process of being assessed for approval. OSAC has developed a registry of forensic science standards that have been given the "gold star" for acceptance as reliable.