One reality not often mentioned is the cost to produce a Valves standard. Since standards are created by volunteers, time spent on standards production is lost time from daily office work. Some conservative figures as to the amount of money that goes into producing a typical valve standard are:

In API, there might be 8 to 10 people on a standards workgroup. Each of these people might spend 30 to 40 hours or more over the course of one to two years in working on details and specific wording. That’s up to 400 hours at a total compensation value of $125 per hour, which is $50,000. Then, the standard is discussed at three or four larger committee meetings. These meetings would be attended by 30 or more voting members for three days—24 hrs x 30 people = 720 hours (or $90,000). Add into that an average per person of $1,500 for transportation, hotel and meals ($45,000) and the value is $135,000 per meeting, with an average of three meetings required to get a standard passed.

If five standards are worked concurrently, the cost of each standard would be $81,000 (calculated based on a cost of $135,000 per meeting x 3 meetings = $405,000, divided by 5 standards = $81,000) for the committee meeting activity. This makes that standard have a value of over $130,000 before a single page is printed. Besides a few ego bruises and a slice or two of humble pie, all a workgroup member receives in return for those 12 to 24 months of participation is a copy of the document when it’s published.

Besides the expense of participation, one problem the standards-making bodies face today is loss of revenue from copyright infringement or in some cases outright theft. Since digital copiers and scanners are so accurate, it’s a given that pages of a standard, or entire standards, are copied and disseminated without authorization. Outright theft comes from dishonest, foreign-based companies that make copies and then sell them over the internet. If you look hard enough, you can find virtually any specification for sale online from both legitimate and ­illegitimate suppliers. Large-scale bogus sellers of ASTM, ASME and MSS documents have surfaced in South America and Russia. In some cases, the document bandits are difficult to find and prosecute. Still, ASTM recently sued a company in Brazil selling many types of engineering standards, and the company was ordered to stop selling the documents. However, the lawsuit was very costly for ASTM, a fact that has kept other standards-developing organizations from ­following that lead.