Hello Sergio:

One should not have old obsolete standards available - they will be misused .

However all standards should be made available on line (pdf format) for FREE. Then there will no excuse for not using them. Only Paper versions should be priced.

When I was on the EIA/JEDEC council 30 years ago I got them to make all their solid state standards FREE on-line.

Many publishing houses now allow one to download free copies of research articles for FREE. This also includes Government Pubic laws.

Think BIG

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay 

One should not have old obsolete standards available - they will be misused .

Access to old standards can sometimes be very useful - e.g. in understanding how existing installations were designed and therefore evaluate the actual risks and dangers a system that apparently doesn't conform to the latest standard actually poses - a fundamental part of EICRs for example.  Or when maintaining older equipment. Likewise it can sometimes be useful to understand the history and derivation of current regulations as sometimes the 'thereafter amended by committee' approach doesn't always result in the clearest wording (which i useful during the DPC stages).

   - Andy.

Hi Peter

Peter Brooks said:

One should not have old obsolete standards available - they will be misused

Others have said similar but at the moment in the UK most standards are paid for, thus some people/companies don’t read them at all.  This is a shame as I truly believe the better educated we are on the standards the better engineering we can achieve.  Our cousins across the pond are already ahead of us in that respect as they offer things like accesss to ANSI


ANSI said its IBR Portal is an effort to make the standards “reasonably available” to people seeking to follow federal rules that reference them.

The above quote is taken from URL below
www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/.../9476-ansi-offers-free-read-only-access-to-standards-referenced-in-federal-regs



The EU are looking into

Free access to European harmonised technical standards

As I stated in the original post there are valid reason when an older version is very useful, see below

Sergio Fernandez said:

These could be published in a PDF format with a watermark on every page stating that this is not the current or latest version and for the current version can be found on the BSI web site.  This then allows people to look at the information from older versions and allow them to use it for research or for study purposes.  If you take BS7671 as an example has over 60 Normative References to other BS standards like BS 5839 which in effect is a whole suite of standards.  Sometimes people are unsure if that publication will satisfy their requirements.  

As a scenario BS7671 makes reference to BS7430 and BS7430 makes reference to BS7671

This does preclude to the next question.  If it is free for all to use then who pays for the Standards to be produced, how will it be funded?

Sergio Fernandez said:

This does preclude to the next question.  If it is free for all to use then who pays for the Standards to be produced, how will it be funded?

Agreed - see my post above. Likely the tax payer rather than consumers of the products or services to which a specific standard pertains.

Sergio Fernandez said:

This does preclude to the next question.  If it is free for all to use then who pays for the Standards to be produced, how will it be funded?

Agreed - see my post above. Likely the tax payer rather than consumers of the products or services to which a specific standard pertains.