Call to publish freely ISO standards & scientific papers

It is ironic that ISO standards aren't freely available, you have to actually pay to get a copy. So if I wanted to write an ISO C++ compiler that would be pretty hard without paying ISO in Switzerland 102 CHF (£66).

It's now time for ISO to modernise, move with the internet generation and publish ISO standards online for no-charge. Other standards organisations like the Khronos Group (and the previous ARB group) with their OpenGL standards have been published online for decades! This has furthered the adoption of those standards ;)

Scientific papers suffer the same problem, when scientists want to publish a papers they assign copyright to a publishing Journal. The Journal organises the peer-review of the paper, and then charges for the final version in the form of journal subscriptions and one-off payments.

It's now also time for a new paper publishing model too, as Journals have ramped up prices so much it is now financially economical to look for a fairer model which cuts out those greedy Journals! This means we get all the papers in nice electronic form too ;)

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern is taking steps to provide freely all data and papers from its experiments. So we have a great organisation taking the lead, setting the standard to follow!