Harmonised technical standards to be publicly available in EU

[Jeroen3]

In the netherlands there was a case where explicitly mentioned standards should be freely available.
This was successful, and now there are some freely available standards: https://connect.nen.nl/portal/Registreren/dwingend-verwezen-normen

Several additional cases were attempted afterwards. For example, our constitution states that laws are only in effect after they have been published in the "staatsblad", a official government publication. And, laws cannot have copyright in our copyright law.
There were some more attempts to unlock more standards, but failed since "relevant industry standards" isn't specific enough.

Such case Europe-wide would be nice, but it's easily circumvented by changing laws to say "relevant industry standards".
Don't get your hopes up.

[soldar]

Such case Europe-wide would be nice, but it's easily circumvented by changing laws to say "relevant industry standards".

That would not fly with me.

If the law mentions code or norm explicitly, by name, then that code or norm is part of the law and has to be followed (and should be free).

If the law just says "relevant industry standards" then any lawyer worth his salt is going to argue that anything not freely available is not "relevant industry standard". It can lead to endless arguments about what can be considered "relevant industry standards".

[mikeselectricstuff]

British Standards (and possibly others) have always been publicly available for free at your local library. The caveat is/was that they arrived on microfiche so you couldn't copy them. Nothing to stop you writing down all the important bits, though. (Not sure how the system works these days. Does anyone even still use microfiche?)

My county library service had the facility to download non-printable PDFs of BSI standards a while ago, watermarked with the user's login ID - no idea if this is still running

[TimFox]

As I mentioned above, in my student days I could photocopy directly from microfilm and microfiche at libraries.
Specifically, Chicago Public Library had US patents, ASTM standards, as well as major newspapers on film or fiche in the pre-PDF era.

[artag]

I used to go and read them directly at the BSi library which was conveniently close to me in Milton Keynes.

My recollection is that I could read whatever I wanted freely but there were no facilities to print or copy them and I couldn't borrow them. That was before the days when we all started carrying high-resolution digital cameras with us. it would likely be a lot harder to enforce now.

Sadly, the library moved to Richmond and I haven't visited since. I haven't tried to access them via the town library. It would be interesting to find out : I suspect I'd have to wait months for an inter-library loan rather than dig out some microfiche.

I think university libraries may not be an easy solution. They already have a huge problem subscribing to all the for-profit research paper publishers and may well not have paid for similar access to standards. That might depend on the university's departments and specialities. Access to those libraries might also not be trivial. I used to wander into Cranfield University library freely - it's quite a technical university and had lots of interesting references. But security has become an issue and I think it's now necessary to get membership. That might not be free if you're not on the roll.

[switchabl]

A bit of an update on this one. I wanted to see how this would work in practice, so I formally requested access to several harmonised standards through the EU Commission (more specifically, DG GROW). Including the latest version of forum favourite EN IEC 61010-2-033 .

So far, they haven't said no but they keep stalling. Ordinarily, they would have to either provide the requested documents or reasons for refusal within 15 working days. The deadline can be extended by another 15 working days in "exceptional cases", which they have done, citing ongoing consultations within the Commission. They have now informed me that they can't meet the extended deadline either.

I guess they still haven't fully figured out how they are going to deal with this. If nothing happens, I still have a couple of options to escalate my case and keep it moving (short of taking it to court). We'll see.