The usual workaround is to publish the final preprint publicly, and give Elsevier/etc an identical paper just with the “[Preprint]” watermark or letterhead removed.

The Ada Rapporteur Group managed to have the standard be free.

ISO/ANSI still sell it, but it's identical and the free Language Reference Manual is accepted as canonical: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html

I think the trick was to do make sure the US Government holds copyrights, and then there is some rule that government documents need to be free.

Maybe someone can comment on the specifics, it's been years since I've heard that.

Indeed, and I encourage people to look for "preprints" and "drafts" for standards they are interested in. Sometimes you need to look for the WG pages/forums that developed it, and they are usually public, especially for the IT-related standards.

I've learned C intricacies by printing and going through an "ISO C9X" draft of the standard while in high school.

In a similar vein, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone's implementing the actual C++ specifications rather than the final drafts.

Microsoft has the ISO specs.

Microsoft was also so appalled by the ISO's modus operandi that they chose to publish their open specs with the ECMA that doesn't impose a paywall.

The Common Lisp Hyperspec is one good example of this principle.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/

By "Elsevier" you mean "research journal publishers". There's more than one, and many have the same policies, depending on the publication. Elsevier doesn't even publish the biggest journals.

What's weird to me is that nobody has to submit their standard or paper to ISO or a journal, they could just put them on a blog post somewhere. But people still complain that these organizations, who people voluntarily submitted their papers to, are actually charging people for what they said they would charge for, or take the rights they said they would take. It's not like somebody was tricked. This is like a manufacturer giving their jeans to Wal-Mart to sell and complaining that Wal-Mart is taking a cut. Yeah..... they're selling it. That's how that works. The manufacturer could always sell them out of the back of a truck... but they don't want to.

Of course you can just put your specification somewhere in a blog post, but chances are it will be taken more seriously if it goes through a process of review and ratification by national and international standardization organizations.

The point of standardization is that you reach an international consensus on how to do something. If everyone can just create their favorite variant of the spec and put it on their blog, then that would be quite fun, but it wouldn't exactly be the best way to achieve interoperability.

Here's an opinion: the world would be a better place if copyrights (on creative works and similar, including texts) lasted for several years and exclusive rights would not be transferrable.

I've thought that for a while. It gets tricky with works for hire. Perhaps that distinction needs to go away?