I am glad that this is getting attention. Open access has been a discussed issue for academic journals for some time already but the locked down access for standards has received little attention. In addition to ISO the IEEE, SAE, NMEA all have their standards behind paywalls. Even ASN.1 was for many years, long after it was adopted for the RSA PKCS standards, a paywalled standard. This is incredibly frustrating.
I remember sending cheques to "Global Engineering Documents" in Englewood Colorado to get printed copies of various standards back in the 1990s and hoping that would die with the advent of the Internet and the possibility of cheaply distributing information. It was understandable in the world of paper that if you wanted some obscure technical document that it was expensive. They retained the publishing model but eliminated the reason it was expensive.
It has been encouraging that people like Carl Malamud have been working at making various aspects of our laws, regulations and standards public but more work is needed.
Some of my tweets over the years on the topic of open access standards:
"I am really thrilled by sudden attention on paywalled standards. Current model hurts standardization. So how about it @SAEIntl, @IEEESA, @NMEA_org, @isostandards, @ITUstandards will you join the 21st century and move to free open access standards? Alternative is your irrelevancy."
https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1369033695030513670
"I don't like that @IEEESA or @SAEIntl put their standards behind paywalls. Whatever revenue this publishing model makes is grossly offset by the impairment to, you know, standardization."
https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308889681187221505
"How many bullshit encodings have been created since 1984 because ASN.1 wasn't a freely available standard? Not that it is perfect but SO MUCH PAIN could have been avoided if there had been community adoption. That adoption didn't happen because it was not an open access standard."
https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308892326098546691
I remember sending cheques to "Global Engineering Documents" in Englewood Colorado to get printed copies of various standards back in the 1990s and hoping that would die with the advent of the Internet and the possibility of cheaply distributing information. It was understandable in the world of paper that if you wanted some obscure technical document that it was expensive. They retained the publishing model but eliminated the reason it was expensive.
It has been encouraging that people like Carl Malamud have been working at making various aspects of our laws, regulations and standards public but more work is needed.
Some of my tweets over the years on the topic of open access standards:
"I am really thrilled by sudden attention on paywalled standards. Current model hurts standardization. So how about it @SAEIntl, @IEEESA, @NMEA_org, @isostandards, @ITUstandards will you join the 21st century and move to free open access standards? Alternative is your irrelevancy." https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1369033695030513670
"It annoys me that the IEEE standard for publishing test results probably won't be adopted by software industry because it is behind a fricking paywall https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8662798" https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1273718847497887744
"I don't like that @IEEESA or @SAEIntl put their standards behind paywalls. Whatever revenue this publishing model makes is grossly offset by the impairment to, you know, standardization." https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308889681187221505
"How many bullshit encodings have been created since 1984 because ASN.1 wasn't a freely available standard? Not that it is perfect but SO MUCH PAIN could have been avoided if there had been community adoption. That adoption didn't happen because it was not an open access standard." https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/1308892326098546691
"Free the codes! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publicresource/public-s... Only slightly worse than patent trolls are public standards behind paywalls." https://twitter.com/mjduigou/status/384767046753320962