[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Chris Hills]

I think this highlights the problem 

Not that you have to pay for standard and boos but the costs and the publishing processes.

Standards bodies are simply specialised publishers.  They need a total re-think of how they work and their model of business.  They don't seemed to have changed much in how they think from the traditional publishers of the pre computer/Internet age.  In the same way Universities don't recognise "unproductive"  free PDF's of books that would be "productive" hard copy that no one will buy.   THAT is where the problems are not in the specific number of  Euro on the cover.  

So Peters initial post about how do we change the way Standards bodies work (publish as opposed to the WG's)  is the question.   Some of these bodies are still very "last century". 

Regards
   Chris 

Phaedrus Systems Ltd         
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-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: 12 May 2016 10:42
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

On 2016-05-12 09:53 , SPRIGGS, John J wrote:
> When we have sorted out standards, we could turn our attention to text books, which are also prohibitively expensive in many cases.

My 2001 Causal System Analysis book was accepted for publication by a major technical publisher.....
at a jacket price of about €100. They wanted me to sign over all rights.

It was a text for our System Safety course. No student would have bought it (here, most balk even at €25). I declined the offer and kept it for free on our WWW site.

Bad political move. For university beancounters free books on WWW sites don't exist (I've come up against that three times in four books). Yes, you read that right. Get a book published at a price none of your students will pay, and you are evaluated as "productive". Put it up for free download where your students can use it for a module you teach, and you are "unproductive".

I even had a colleague tell me to my face in 2011 that he couldn't find anything I'd published in the previous five years (2007-11). Failing all else, he could simply have typed my last name into Google.

Moral: Some business models are worse than those we've been talking about :-(

PBL
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de