What are Open Standards ?

An open standard is a standard  is a publicly available standard. 

It has been designed through an open process and has various rights to use associated with it

The terms open and standard have a wide range of meanings their usage and context.

They emphasize different aspects of openness,  resulting specification, the process of  drafting process, and the ownership of rights.

The term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties on a consensus basis.

The definitions of the term open standard used by academics, governments, industry  associations , World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where  it's  specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.

Many definitions of the term standard permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers or users of the standard. 

For example, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. 

 IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards", while the others refer only to producing "standards". 

Open-source software community hold "open standard" as open if it can be freely adopted, implemented and extended.

Open standards or architectures are considered non-proprietary in the sense that the standard is either unowned or owned by a collective body, it can still be publicly shared and not tightly guarded.