SDOs won’t make them available for free.
Mendelson 14 – Joseph L. Sax Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, J.D. from Yale University.
Nina Mendelson, “Private Control over Access to Public Law: The Perplexing Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards,” Michigan Law Scholarship Repository, 03-01-2014, https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/887/
And as noted, private SDOs do generally charge significantly. The amounts far exceed the “direct costs of search, duplication, or review” that federal agencies may charge for FOIA requests for internal agency documents.76 By contrast, there is no charge to access statutes and federal regulations (other than IBR rules) in over 1,200 governmental depository libraries.77 As numerous groups and citizens have recently written, the fees that SDOs charge can be prohibitive, particularly for ordinary citizens and small businesses subject to the standards. For example, an architect wrote to the OFR noting that his work often required compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and its implementing regulations, which include some incorporated standards; the occasional access needed to incorporated standards was so expensive that the standards could not be considered “reasonably available” to him.78 Similarly, a homeowner pointed out in public comments that homeowners are normally permitted to perform repairs and renovations to their own homes without hiring professionals but that for him to understand the applicable sprinkler system rules, he would have had to purchase that single standard privately at an “excessive” cost of $82.79