Our story
Built so standards bodies never have to choose
The sale of publications funds the technical work, and the technical work keeps whole industries safe. We built NormScan so a national body never has to choose between protecting its collection and getting on with its mission.
Why we exist
A standard is sold once. Then it's copied forever. One licensed PDF is renamed, re-hosted, mirrored and translated across a long tail of hosts far beyond the obvious ones. Manual search reaches a fraction of them. By the time an in-house team finds one, more are already live, each a licence that will not be sold, and each one placing a text beyond the body's control, with no way to establish how far it has spread, which edition is in circulation, or whether it carries the amendments and corrigenda that make it current.
CEN-CENELEC Guide 10 and ISO POCOSA both require members to document unauthorized reproduction and act to stop it. The organizations that carry that duty are not equipped to chase copies across the publicly accessible web, and should not have to be. That is the gap NormScan was built to close.
What we do
We do the finding, the documenting and the removing, discreetly and continuously, so it never has to come out of a member's week. Every case is opened the moment a reproduction is confirmed, pursued through every level of escalation available to us, and kept as an immutable record from detection to removal. It is a fully managed service: nothing to install, no dashboard to staff.
Why a specialist
Generic brand-protection tools were built to fingerprint logos and match filenames. Standards do not circulate that way. They circulate as renamed, translated, scanned and re-typeset PDFs carrying no usable metadata, which slip straight past tools looking for a brand mark. And beyond finding them, a standards collection needs an approach that tells the edition in force from the one it superseded, separates an identical national adoption from the international text it implements, and knows which member holds which rights in which territory. That is the depth a general-purpose platform is not built for, and it is the only thing we do.
Where we are
NormScan has completed a first pilot with Instituto Português da Qualidade, the Portuguese national standardization body and the ISO, CEN and CENELEC member for Portugal. The platform was built multi-tenant from day one, ready for national bodies and for European and international organizations alike, without migration. We are early, deliberately focused, and growing with the bodies we serve.
NormScan is part of INOVA Quality Hub's 2026 cohort, the innovation hub of Instituto Português da Qualidade, the Portuguese national standardization body. It is a fitting home: we build for the standards world from inside one of its members.
How we work
- Discreet. We work quietly on the rights holder's behalf. Nobody at the body chases hosts or files notices; we do.
- Evidence-led. Every claim we make is backed by a matched passage, a source, the edition identified, and a timestamped record.
- Persistent. A case stays open through each level of escalation available to us, and we say plainly when a copy is beyond reach.
The Founder's Desk
We built NormScan because protecting a collection should not mean pulling specialists off the work that matters. Where publications are in circulation they should not be, we would like to establish the scale of it, and then do something about it.
João Mota, Founder, NormScan
Reach us any time at joao@normscan.com.