Universities and Institutes are responsible for assigning publication elements to the individual items they publish and for ensuring the application of pertinent regulations. They may apply for and receive a registrant element from ISTN registration agency together with a printout or electronic file of the individual ISTNs that are available to them within the allocated registrant element. ISTN registration agency may charge a fee for these services.

The ISTN registration agency will determine the range of publication elements that will be available to the universities and institutes. The range assigned will be determined based on current and anticipated future publication output and is directly related to the length of the registrant element allocated. The universities and institutes should ensure that the ISTN registration agency has as much information as possible about all available backlist publications and should advise the agency of all present and future publications in order for the assignment of a suitably sized registrant element.

The universities and institutes should supply the ISTN registration agency with a specified amount of metadata about the publication to which the ISTN is assigned. The specifications concerning the type and format of the metadata should established by the International ISTN Agency. Each ISTN is a unique “number” assigned by a centralized registration system to a thesis work, when a unique set of information about that work, known as a “metadata record”, is entered into the system. If another, identical metadata record has already been registered (perhaps, in the case of an out of copyright work, by another), the system will assume the new ISTN request refers to the same work and will output the ISTN of the identical (or nearly identical) metadata record already held on the system. An ISTN does “belong” to a same authors/universities or institutes. This means that the same ISTN number should be used to identify the same content even when it is being published by a different publication format. ISTN's assignment to a thesis should have significant meaning and value as legal evidence regarding the copyright status or any intellectual property rights of the work.