@technicaladept @ZachWeinersmith I helped write an #IEEE standard. (This is a traditional academic process - working group members volunteer their time and expertise to create the standard and the publisher profits.)

We looked into making it open access, on the premise of "It's a standard. More people will use it and it will be a net good for the world because things will be compatible, which is what we literally wrote the standard for!"

We were told that the IEEE Standards Association would charge the IEEE society whose working group created the standard tens of thousands of US dollars to open source it. There was no way we would have been able to get our society to approve the transfer that kind of money to another branch of the IEEE for one standard.

I don't know what the money the Standards Association gets from people buying standards (roughly $100/copy) goes to, but I can't imagine that the cost of the editorial staff plus the costs of maintaining the mailing lists, keeping up the archive, and providing software tools like WebEx and iMeetCentral to support collaboration comes close to that income.