As Elena Santiago has mentioned, we are undertaking a major effort to improve access to standards and the standards process for SMEs – in the process these measures will benefit all stakeholders.
The study to which Elena referred contained no less than 58 recommendations. Each one is already being implemented in one way or another by one or more of our members. What we are doing is simply to try to extend these existing good practices as widely as possible within CEN-CENELEC and our members.
The recommendations have been grouped into a number of areas of which the major ones are :
- Increasing Awareness/ Education and Communication (web sites, training etc – noting we also have in the ESOs a Joint Working Group on how to improve this generally);
- Improving Access to Standards – Search Facilities, Information and Price (packages for reduced-price access, read-only access for drafts, abstracts of European Standards free of charge on line);
- Easier Use of Standards (making the text easier to understand, fewer cross-references etc);
- Increased Participation – Information on New Projects and how to get involved.
We intend to complete this exercise by the end of 2011. We think this should dramatically improve understanding of openness, noting that many of the issues are in fact related to difficulties to communicate to the market, rather than being barriers as such.
