Committee on Data for Science and Technology

CODATA (Committee on Data for Science and Technology) was established in 1966 as an interdisciplinary committee of the International Council of Science (ICSU), formerly the International Council of Scientific Unions. It seeks to improve the compilation, critical evaluation, storage, and retrieval of data of importance to science and technology.

The CODATA Task Group on Fundamental Constants was established in 1969. Its purpose is to periodically provide the international scientific and technological communities with an internationally accepted set of values of the fundamental physical constants and closely related conversion factors for use worldwide. The first such CODATA set was published in 1973, later in 1986, 1998, 2002 and the fifth in 2006.

The CODATA recommended values of fundamental physical constants are published at the NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty.