Re: Proposed IESG statement on referencing documents behind a paywall

[Suresh Krishnan <[e-mail]>]

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