Trond Trosterud wrote on 2002-01-03 16:20 UTC: > Markus writes: > >The problem with ISO and some of its member bodies is not just that the > >standards are not free, but that they are ridiculously expensive. > > For all except large, rich companies, yes they certainly are, but since > their purpose is to finance ISO itself I guess there are people who want an > even higher price... Thus, the prices are not comparable to book prices, > since they have a different purpose: They function as taxes for standard > users, rather than as prices covering the expences of the authors and > publishers.
In the case of ISO, the price is not covering the expenses of the authors. Their expenses (travel, time, research, etc.) is covered usually by their respective employers. The ISO central secretariat has 130 employees in Geneva, and their salaries is covered to around 30% by sales of documents and to around 70% by contributions from national member bodies. DIN in Berlin has around 1000 employees, and judging from the size of their tower in London, I don't think that BSI is much smaller. They are financed by both sales of documents and membership fees of organizations. It seems that national members such as DIN, ANSI, BSI, AFNOR, etc. are very eager to make sure that ISO standards are not cheaper than the equivalent national standards, otherwise ISO might become a competitor. ISO is bound by the decision of its paying national member organizations, it can't change its policy against their agreement, even if someone in Geneva wanted to. [Figures are from 1995, when I visited ISO last time.] > >ECMA demonstrates very successfully, how you can run a standards body > >very comparable in structure and procedures to ISO, without charging for > >the documents. > >[...] > > Your ECMA example does not demonstrate #how# you can do it, but #that# you > can do it. The how to is easy: You run a much smaller shop with not more than 20-40 employees and you finance it completely based on industrial membership fees. If a representative from a company wants to join a committee, the company has to become a member, which costs a few tens of kilo$ per year, not more than a typical minor patent licence and far less than a single employee. I have seen ISO's operation 5 years ago, and I think there was a lot of room for efficiency improvement and better use of IT. Their business model at the time hadn't changed much since the 1950s and their efficiency is certainly not anywhere comparable to that of other scientific publishers. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
