This International Standard specifies the terms and definitions, as well as the service requirements, for organizations and professionals who own and/or use access panels for market, opinion and social research. It develops the criteria against which access panel providers can be evaluated and against which the quality of access panels can be assessed.

This International Standard is applicable to all types of access panels, whether recruited and used online (e.g. via internet) or offline (e.g. via telephone, post or face-to-face interaction).

NOTE 1 Some individual access panel providers carry out only some processes relevant to the requirements of this International Standard. Relevant processes could also be the responsibility of separate organizations, e.g. an access panel owner and a research service provider carrying out a survey using the access panel.

NOTE 2 Access panels are actively managed and, in this way, differentiated from sampling frames, simple databases and lists of addresses and names including respondents to previous surveys.