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.

Peter Brooks said:

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

Two reasons I use them (and remembering my job is to assess clients compliance to standards!) One is when looking at older products which state that they are compliant to obsolete standards we need copies of those standards to know what they were assessed to. Then we can consider whether they are still appropriate for current acceptance at which sections, if any, need re-assessment.

And secondly, if you are working on a, say, five year development project (and in the rail industry five years is blindingly fast!), and the standards are updated part way through, it will often be agreed by all parties that compliance will be made to the standards originally specified in the contract, subject to some form of risk analysis. Of course the situation is slightly different for legally mandated standards, where there will be a grace period to allow for this, but for non-legally mandated standards it's up to a contractual agreement, and very often the end client does not want the supplier to charge them more and add in delays while they rework to the latest standard which adds no practical benefit.

Of course the status of standards (current or withdrawn) needs to be clearly stated, but access to obsolete standards is vital - I occasionally find myself having to refer to standards which might have been withdrawn 50 years ago to understand what the original specification and requirements of ancient, but still in service, equipment was.

A huge percentage of UK rail infrastructure is compliant to standards which were obsoleted many years ago...and, dare I say it, those are often not the bits that break!

As well as ongoing contracts using dated versions of standards that are not current, we also use them in consideration of legal cases for various reasons, typically relating to 'available knowledge' or 'state of the art' in the particular time-frames being considered in the particular case (whether criminal or civil).

As well as ongoing contracts using dated versions of standards that are not current, we also use them in consideration of legal cases for various reasons, typically relating to 'available knowledge' or 'state of the art' in the particular time-frames being considered in the particular case (whether criminal or civil).