Re: Proposed IESG statement on referencing documents behind a paywall

[Karen O'Donoghue <[e-mail]>]

> On Jun 13, 2019, at 6:49 AM, Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Please remember that there are many independent IEEE groups and IEEE1588
> is part of the Test and Measurement group not 802.
> 
> WRT to IEEE1588v2, we negotiated its release to the IETFfor use in
> IETF work, from before the time it was published. We did this when I was a chair of TICTOC. It has therefore been available on request for this purpose for its entire lifetime. I have not been asked for a copy for many years. Did we simply forget that we had access to this material?

Hi Stewart…

No… we didn’t “simply forget that we had access to this material…”

Yes… the IEEE 1588 working group and the TICTOC working group worked closely on some documents, and we had access to the underlying 1588 documents as needed. The issue arose when we sent the resulting document to the IESG and out for broader review to the IETF community. We were not clear in that step of the process about how to get access all the documents needed to do a review. 

The policy that Suresh (the IESG) has put forward deals very effectively with that situation and is very manageable for doing the necessary work. As someone who has wrestled with this issue, it makes sense to me. As you know, IEEE 1588 is a very small group, and it does not fall under the umbrella of IEEE 802. The proposed policy is a pragmatic answer to the situation. 

Karen

> 
> - Stewart
> 
> 
> On 13/06/2019 04:45, Suresh Krishnan wrote:
>> Hi Toerless,
>>> On Jun 12, 2019, at 6:31 PM, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks Suresh
>>> 
>>> 1) Is there a specific event or events tha ha let to picking up this
>>> topic now ? Just curious, because i thought we have lived with this
>>> situation for a long time unchanged. E.g.: has IEEE raised its prices (which i
>>> would know because of my companies subscription...) ?
>> Yes. This is a result of a document going through the IETF process. The document in question is the draft that became RFC8575. It referred to the IEEE1588 spec that described some of the parameters being used in the yang module.
>>> 
>>> 2) Associated ask:
>>> 
>>> I would like IETF if we can have a process by which IEEE
>>> documents that are references to IETF document can be made
>>> available FOR FREE to the reviewers of those drafts during the draft->RFC process.
>>> Aka: Some form of IEEE membership account for IETF WG chairs, simple
>>> email statement from reviewer back to chair to not disseminate the
>>> document, and then chairs could pass on those documents as requested by
>>> reviewers.
>>> 
>>> Note that i would love to see this not only for normative but also
>>> informative IEEE references to help reviewers.
>>> 
>>> I know this does not scale to arbitrary SDOs, but IEEE seems to be the
>>> most important one, and i think this should work for IEEE, and i can't
>>> see how this would run the risk of being massively abused if we have WG chairs in
>>> control of access.
>> Yes. This would be great, and we have managed to get free access to most (but not all) of the IEEE specs when needed. Also, we have different kind of relationships with different IEEE groups. e.g. we have had a very close relationship with IEEE 802 over the years and the published standards are mostly available for free. For the document mentioned above, we did make arrangements to make the document available for anyone who wanted to review. I started a second IETF Last call with the following message appended
>> "If you would like to review this document and
>> would like a copy of the [IEEE1588] reference specification, please send a
>> note to the Responsible AD <[e-mail]> and the tictoc working
>> group chairs <[e-mail]> and we will provide you a copy of
>> the document."
>> Thanks
>> Suresh
>