Compared with other standards, BS 7671 is pretty cheap. That may be because it is sold in much greater quantities than yer average Standard, or perhaps the aim is to encourage compliance.

Previous editions can be found on eBay pretty cheaply.

I'd like to see British Standards much more freely available. At one time Hampshire CC libraries subscribed, but not for many years.

Laws must be freely available and clear so that people can see what they have to do to comply. I think that the same could be said of BS EN ISO standards. However, there is a difference between a manufacturer buying a copy of say, BS 1363 to ensure that their plugs comply on the one hand, and a consumer who wishes to check that the plugs that he has bought do indeed comply on the other hand.

So should the BSI be nationalised and funded by the tax-payer?

Hi Chris

I do think that all CC libraries should have access to the British Standards.  Let see if any senior BSI people enter the debate to educate me/us as to why this is wrong.  It does seem that sometimes things/information get hidden behind PayWalls. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

I do think that all CC libraries should have access to the British Standards. 

Agreed.

And I'm sure BSI would be very happy to sell them to them... In the end BSI is a business, and libraries have (very!) limited budget and need to decide what's going to add value to the majority of their customers. I'm not saying I agree with that position, but it is where we are. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

Let see if any senior BSI people enter the debate to educate me/us as to why this is wrong. 

I can't imagine anyone from BSI comes on here, but in any case I'm sure their answer would be that, as above, they are a business, anyone is free to buy their standards. They are (as I understand it) a non-profit business, but they still have to cover their costs. If they make standards freely available then this will reduce their income unless they push up the prices to those who do pay for them. (Again, rightly or wrongly.)

I would suggest that this would need government expenditure / intervention, and I can't see a case being made here is to why it is to the public benefit for standards to be freely available. I'm not saying there isn't a case, but it does need to be made clear. I'd suggest it needs to be shown that someone is at risk of loss or harm due to not having free access to standards. Remembering that if a member of the public does suffer loss or harm due to, e.g., a piece of equipment being falsely or incorrectly declared as compliant to a standard then it would be e.g. Trading Standards or HSE who would be pursuing this - who have access to both to the standards and to the expert opinion to interpret it. 

Which is a further point, any of us who are in the business of interpreting standards know that this is rarely straightforward, tbh I feel the cost of the standards pales into insignificance compared to the professional costs involved in understanding them - for the average member off the public they would need to employ an expert to assist anyway. Of course there are some of us in the middle, as I suspect many of us on this thread are, professionals using standards for non-chargeable work (in my case going into Savoy Place to read BS7671 for working on my own house wiring!). But I suspect the response would be that this isn't something for (that much overused term) "the taxpayer" to fund - it would be a benefit to us, not a reduction in public risk.

Yes, particularly as I am a bit of a standards nerd, I would love to have free access to standards, but I really struggle to come up with a convincing argument as to why I should have that access. But very happy if someone can! 

Thanks,

Andy

At one time Hampshire CC libraries subscribed,

I too recall a teenage me cycling to the local library in Shenfield in Essex  to view a copy of a standard that have been got there specially for me as an intra-library loan request from Chelmsford or somewhere - but that was in the 1970s. And I was probably a fairly odd teenager then to bother. (and maybe a fairly odd adult now to bother too but let's not go there right  now)
I suspect that there is no BSI discount for libraries however, and they will have looked at their catalogues and what it costs and decided that it is more important to stock stuff that is more commonly requested.

And you get a  lot more sheets of paper per pound spent for a typical book ;-) 

Governments do sometimes reach into their pockets for the national interest.

For some time now the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has offered free read-only (not print or cut and paste) access to all US standards called up in legislation 

It does not seem to have driven ANSI to bankruptcy, even though given how often one standard then calls up another, it means sometimes quite a lot of documents are involved when  though the regulations refer to just the first one in the tree.

Defence standards (and the US/NATO milspecs ) have been free for years, you just need the right clearances to download  some of them - the EMC standards are particularly good compared to commercial euronorms ;-)

Mike

In northern Ireland BS docs (British Standards) are available in all the local libraries for anyone a friend tells me.  They also inform me that the quality of electrical work in NI is high. 

In northern Ireland BS docs (British Standards) are available in all the local libraries for anyone a friend tells me.  They also inform me that the quality of electrical work in NI is high.