EURAS Proceedings 2007

Introduction The benefits of standards to the marketplace and to society as a whole have been much written about and are generally well understood. Less understood is the true cost of standards – what it costs to develop and approve a standard, and especially who pays those costs. To the casual observer of or participant in standards activities the “cost of standards” may be the price one pays to purchase a document copy of the completed work. This is indeed one business model used in the standards world, used by many of the international, accredited, or de jure standards organizations. Revenue from the sale of standards document can account for half of the organization’s revenues, as is the case with ISO1. With this model the user or implementer of the standard bears some of the cost of the standards development as revenue from the sale of the standard goes to provide infrastructure and staff support for the standards development effort. But these sales revenues go to the standards organization and not to the developers, and wouldn’t normally be large enough to offset any significant portion of the work. Whether the standards organization sells the standards or not the greatest burden of costs is borne by the participants in the standards development and approval activity, as we shall see below…