Lack of copyright will crush revenue streams.
McGrath 21 – Chief Innovation Officer at Propylon, Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin.
Sean McGrath, “Standards Development Organizations – The Future Revenue Model,” Propylon, 05-13-2021, https://propylon.com/standards-development-organizations-future-model/
These are challenging times for Standards Development Organizations (SDOs). Standards-making has always been an expensive undertaking – especially for accredited, consensus-based standards – yet revenue streams to fund the process are under unprecedented levels of threat in the digital age.
The old reliable – print revenues – that worked so well for many decades are now all but gone. The obvious digital substitute of these print revenues – PDFs – is increasingly looked upon with frustration by consumers of standards. Consumers of the standards want to be able to integrate standards content into their workflows so they can be notified about what is changing and what the impact of the changes are.
SDOs find themselves caught in a bind. They need to generate revenues from their standards to fund their standards-making processes. Their customers like the products – the standards content itself – but they mostly dislike the paper-centric (PDF) mode of delivery that goes with it.