Cost Of Codes & Standards Debate

[yesterlectric]

I imagine the number of people are already aware of this case but I wanted to mention it. There’s a not-for-profit (public.resource.org) that has made a practice of getting all kinds of standards that are usually adopted by law and turning them into digital format and making them free online under the argument that since it is public lol it can’t be copyrighted. Of course, when they started publishing building codes a number of groups including the NFPA filed suit and from the best I can tell the case is yet to be fully resolved.



It’s an interesting position that the group takes. In some ways it makes a lot of sense what they claim. At the same time if this thinking worked at Privato, we would have to come up with some way to fund development and publishing of the standards. It might be that we’d have to pay taxes to fund a Federal government agency to develop. It might be that publishers would have to charge a very large adoption fee to every state that adapts a building code. Neither of these seem like good deals to me.



I don’t know how it works with ASTM or ASHRE, but NFPA at least can argue that it does make the standard available online although less convenient format. From what I’ve been able to gather IEEE is way more protective of their standards to the point where they seem to have made people who teach classes on the NESC to believe that fair use doctrine won’t allow them to even put a small amount of text from the code in an educational slide.



It will be interesting to see what comes of this case and how it would impact standards development in general. Hopefully it won’t be interesting and harmful at the same time however it ends up being resolved.

 

[pv_n00b]

Things are getting better, NFPA and UL now have free, if limited, viewers for their codes and standards through their websites. NEMA seems to be offering some ANSI standards in PDF for download free, but not all. IEEE does not provide anything I know of for free. NFPA stopped offering a PDF version of the NEC to promote their electronic subscription service and reduce sharing. That resulted in a lot of people buying a hard copy and making their own PDFs.
Maybe options for getting free access to codes and standards have been expedited by free sources on the internet such as public.resource.org and just free PDFs people have made available. I feel any codes or standards people are required to follow by AHJs should be required to be free. It does really bother me that code and standard development companies lean heavily on volunteer workers to do most of the work of code development, and then the companies make money off selling that free work, usually at prices that the average user can't afford to pay.

 

[steven765]

The problem is as with IEEE, these publications are often their only source of funding. People need to be paid and organizing these meetings, editing the books, papers, articles, hosting the website and resources all takes real money at the end of the day.

 

[paulengr]

The problem is as with IEEE, these publications are often their only source of funding. People need to be paid and organizing these meetings, editing the books, papers, articles, hosting the website and resources all takes real money at the end of the day.

Not really. IEEE gets a pittance from Elsevier among other publishers. There are a few. IEEE 1584 is intended to “make money”. NESC more or less pays for itself. But many are pretty much based on almost entirely free labor.

If say I’m a grad student and I publish, it’s “free” but I lose control over the work. I get zero in return and IEEE barely covers administrative overhead. They’re not the enemy here.

Regardless of your politics though the big problem is it can cost thousands to do research (reading, not experimental). IEEE charges on average about $35 for a paper and hundreds for standards. In other fields it can be hundreds per paper. With papers in particular you might download one with a great sounding title and abstract only to find it’s not useful or garbage or just repeats something else. I’d say one out of ten is useful. The reason is simple. Universities give you credit for number of published papers. So if I do one project I can write one ten page paper or break up my results and write say ten five page papers where each one only contains a small amount of new material. So as a reader I have to get all ten papers to collect the whole thing. So it can easily cost upwards of over $1000 to research a single topic thoroughly. This places it out of reach of most students or independents. I have personally spent hundreds if not thousands on making copies at large university libraries where I had “free” access (plus parking fees). I could skim the paper copies for free before copying so mostly I collected “good ones”. I spent on average a buck each making copies. Once PDFs really took hold paper copies stopped being purchased by the libraries. Since I wasn’t a paying student anymore, I didn’t have login credentials and lost access.

Google Scholar is a stop gap. Often “drafts” get published on personal or university web sites which are free. I’ve even found draft edited versions of IEEE standards at times. Scholar gives you all the links Google can find so often it shows both paid and free versions. This is free and legal.

Enter sci-hub. There is a Russian “free” (as in they just ignore copyrights) site called sci-lib that accepts anything. You can find most IEEE stuff on there but lookup and download is a little tedious, and it only helps if someone dumped what you need on there. With sci-hub it’s copy/paste. And if you enter a valid paper they don’t have it goes through a list of libraries where they have free access and copies the paper into sci-lib, then gives you access, in real time. Now obviously this is completely “illegal” but mostly it exists in jurisdictions outside copyright law. Elsevier has sued them repeatedly and “won” by default judgements and gotten some domain names banned but they just register a few more in hard to sue jurisdictions like Sweden as well as publishing permanent ones on Tor. It has effectively become a cat and mouse game and the mice are winning.

I’ve bought several copies of NFPA standards, paid student fees, paid professional dues, etc. NFPA has always kept prices somewhat reasonable in my opinion. NFPA is reasonable compared to most professional “books”. But as an example the IEEE arc flash standard costs thousands! And charging anything over a few dollars for scientific papers is so insanely out of touch to the point where I refuse to pay. Obviously I’m not alone or sci-hub wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is.

Just saying.