Publicly Available Standards

https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

by Tomte • 5 years ago

107 57 5 years ago

standards.iso.org

Suggested title: Publicly Available Standards by ISO

ISO is somewhat unique in requiring you to pay money to even know what the standard says before you can ever think about being in compliance.

Most other standards organizations (i.e. NIST, IETF, W3C) do not have this weird financial burden, so merely "Publicly Available Standards" doesn't sell the significance of this.

Making their standards publicly available is a good move by ISO. I hope we see more of this.

hlandau• 5 years ago

This offering isn't, as far as I know, anything new.

AFAIK ISO is funded by their paywall and as an international treaty organisation is probably far harder to reform than industry organisations, so I don't have much hope for this to change.

ISO's attitude to this was recently expressed on Twitter: https://nitter.snopyta.org/MetaCatie/status/1368910356664483...

ISO even takes freely available standards from other organizations and paywalls them, even reneging on previous agreements to make a standard freely available, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/schematron_standard_p...

tephra• 5 years ago

I'm not sure about the numbers but I would have thought that ISOs main funding comes from all the member nations who pay a bunch a money proportional to the countries GDP?

mqus• 5 years ago

Making their standards publicly available is a good move by ISO. I hope we see more of this.

Afaik there were always publicly available standards in the ISO portfolio. Is this list new?

mvanga• 5 years ago

I wonder if there exists a Sci-Hub equivalent for ISO standard PDFs somewhere.

DaiPlusPlus3• 5 years ago

My pet fish found ISO standards PDFs on Sci-Hub a few times.

auxym• 5 years ago

Some can be found on libgen.

Gracana• 5 years ago

I'm envious of people who can work with freely available standards.

In my industry (machine design, industrial automation), almost all of the standards cost money. UL, CSA, NSF, ANSI, ASME, BSi, IEC, ISO, DIN, etc. Our library contains many thousands of dollars worth of documents, and it costs many more to keep them up to date. If your company has a slow or complicated purchasing process, it's a real hinderance when you realize you need a standard and have to stop working so you can deal with acquiring it.

I think the only ones that are freely available are NFPA 70 (national electric code), NFPA 79 (electrical standard for industrial machinery), but if you want to download or print them, you still have to pay.

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

My library (in the same industry) contains a few hundred dollars worth of documents, because that's all I could get purchasing to pay for. We're just a small integrator, many to most in our field simply don't know what's in the documents because they don't buy any of them.

You can go a long way with cargo-cult designs, and a ton of companies get by with approximations, but there are a ton of mistakes made because ANSI/ISO/DIN/IEC refuse to make the documents available for free.

bierjunge• 5 years ago

I feel your pain. Most projects I work on are medical software, often connected to hardware. Getting this stuff certified is impossible without paying thousands of euros for the standards and then you pay even more for a few people who judge if you did it like the standard says.

But maybe the next project will be outside of the medical field.

helloworld112• 5 years ago

Sorry to intrude with an ignorant question, but I know next to nothing about this and it sparked my curiosity. These thousands of dollars in documents are the text descriptions/instructions of various ISO standards? Do they really cost that much or am I misinterpreting? Wouldn't their content have been pirated by now if they were so expensive? (assuming i'm correctly imagining what you said)

OJFord2• 5 years ago

Actually, HN guidelines are to do the reverse:

If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

e.g. if this had been 'ISO announces publicly available standards' on iso.org itself, the submitter should (or if not and a popular/noticed submission, a mod would) change it to the 'Publicly available standards' that it is.

kragen• 5 years ago

An ISO page with a list of publicly available IETF, NIST, and W3C standards would not be nearly as interesting.

AlbertCory• 5 years ago

There's been an extensive debate on an external mailing list about standards, and why TCP won over OSI. The free and open nature of IETF had a hell of a lot to do with it.

Among all the other advantages noted here, it leads to a much shorter development cycle and a greater number of people participating -- people whose energy is invaluable.

swiftcoder• 5 years ago

Not me thinking "all standards should be freely available". Guess I'm a just filthy communist...

jraph• 5 years ago

Or just sensible.

pornel• 5 years ago

In contrast, for all other standards ISO works similarly to Elsevier.

People who write the ISO standards are required to transfer copyright to ISO, and lose control over their work. ISO says the paywall is to pay for development, but the authors don't get a cut of the sales.

https://twitter.com/isostandards/status/1367138676162105344

I don't know how these things usually get done, but the JPEG XL standard has been written for free by volunteers, and ISO paywalled it. The authors would like to change that: https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1415696597585993732

DaiPlusPlus3• 5 years ago

The usual workaround is to publish the final preprint publicly, and give Elsevier/etc an identical paper just with the “[Preprint]” watermark or letterhead removed.

Tomte3• 5 years ago

The Ada Rapporteur Group managed to have the standard be free.

ISO/ANSI still sell it, but it's identical and the free Language Reference Manual is accepted as canonical: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html

I think the trick was to do make sure the US Government holds copyrights, and then there is some rule that government documents need to be free.

Maybe someone can comment on the specifics, it's been years since I've heard that.

necovek• 5 years ago

Indeed, and I encourage people to look for "preprints" and "drafts" for standards they are interested in. Sometimes you need to look for the WG pages/forums that developed it, and they are usually public, especially for the IT-related standards.

I've learned C intricacies by printing and going through an "ISO C9X" draft of the standard while in high school.

andrewaylett• 5 years ago

In a similar vein, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone's implementing the actual C++ specifications rather than the final drafts.

hanche• 5 years ago

The Common Lisp Hyperspec is one good example of this principle.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/

throwaway290232• 5 years ago

By "Elsevier" you mean "research journal publishers". There's more than one, and many have the same policies, depending on the publication. Elsevier doesn't even publish the biggest journals.

What's weird to me is that nobody has to submit their standard or paper to ISO or a journal, they could just put them on a blog post somewhere. But people still complain that these organizations, who people voluntarily submitted their papers to, are actually charging people for what they said they would charge for, or take the rights they said they would take. It's not like somebody was tricked. This is like a manufacturer giving their jeans to Wal-Mart to sell and complaining that Wal-Mart is taking a cut. Yeah..... they're selling it. That's how that works. The manufacturer could always sell them out of the back of a truck... but they don't want to.

jonsneyers• 5 years ago

Of course you can just put your specification somewhere in a blog post, but chances are it will be taken more seriously if it goes through a process of review and ratification by national and international standardization organizations.

The point of standardization is that you reach an international consensus on how to do something. If everyone can just create their favorite variant of the spec and put it on their blog, then that would be quite fun, but it wouldn't exactly be the best way to achieve interoperability.

grishka• 5 years ago

Here's an opinion: the world would be a better place if copyrights (on creative works and similar, including texts) lasted for several years and exclusive rights would not be transferrable.

phkahler3• 5 years ago

I've thought that for a while. It gets tricky with works for hire. Perhaps that distinction needs to go away?

teddyh• 5 years ago

Cool, ISO 10646 was there, but sadly ISO 9995-7 is not.

phkahler3• 5 years ago

Nor is ISO 10303-21 for CAD data (STEP).

rjsw3• 5 years ago

That isn't very useful without 10303-11 and at least one of the model definitions that you want to exchange.

Dah00n• 5 years ago

If I can't read a standard to follow it without paying a lot to see it then it isn't a standard in my world. ISO is more than useless. It is actively doing harm.

HelloNurse• 5 years ago

These standards were made freely available because unusually enlightened committees, common sense, public interests and/or private interests occasionally prevailed over ISO traditions.

rjsw3• 5 years ago

There are also some machine interpretable bits of ISO standards available [1].

[1] https://standards.iso.org/

oezi2• 5 years ago

I wish there were more open access standard organizations.

At least members could force ISO to publish standards once a predefined amount of development costs (let's say 100k per standard is recouped).

rjsw3• 5 years ago

ISO doesn't fund the development costs.

oezi2• 5 years ago

For many standards they do host the committees and do print formatting, redactions, end of life notices, etc.

traceroute662• 5 years ago

Just as an FYI.

If you want to obtain ISO standards legally but for a price significantly lower than ISO, the answer is simple. Buy them from EVS, the Estonian Centre for Standardisation and Accreditation[1].

They have a nice English website, and you don't have to have any ties whatsoever to Eestonia, or Europe.

The customer service people speak perfect English too if you have any questions.

[1] https://www.evs.ee/en/

andrewmcwatters• 5 years ago

Wow, that’s big information. Thank you for sharing.

traceroute662• 5 years ago

Its been a little while since I shopped there, IIRC their search engine is generally good, but if you see high prices come up, just make sure you're looking at the price for the EN version and not the ISO version.

EN just means the regionally adopted version of the standard. For all intensive purposes EN and ISO are typically identical[1][2]. EN is ISO with additional Z Annexes as applicable.

[1]https://northridgequality.com/difference-en-iso-14971-part1/ [2]https://www.wearwell.co.uk/whats-the-difference-between-an-i...

slashdot20082• 5 years ago

wow they have IEC standards for 22 euro instead of 300!

Tomte3• 5 years ago

ANSI used to sell many ISO standards for 18 dollars. C and C++ were available at that price. Unfortunately I didn't buy it then and now they have adjusted their prices.

joelkevinjones• 5 years ago

Some languages, like Ada, Java, and C# have some parts of their standards available. Notably missing are any for C++ (14882) or C (9899).

Publicly Available Standards

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