Publications Office

SUMMARY OF:

Decision 2009/496/EC, Euratom — the organisation and operation of the Publications Office of the European Union

WHAT IS THE AIM OF THIS DECISION?

It sets out the role, responsibilities, tasks and organisational structure of the Publications Office of the European Union.

KEY POINTS

Role

The Publications Office (OP) is an interinstitutional office whose task is to publish the publications of the EU institutions. It is responsible for publishing legal and general publications in both paper and electronic formats, such as:

• the daily Official Journal of the EU in 23 languages (24 when Irish is required);
• a range of websites for EU citizens, governments and businesses, including:
  • EUR-Lex,
  • EU Open Data Portal,
  • EU Bookshop,
  • Tenders Electronic Daily,
  • the Community Research and Development Information Service.

The OP also ensures the long-term preservation of content produced by EU institutions and bodies.

In addition, the OP provides advice and assistance to the EU institutions in a number of areas, including:

• programming and planning their publications programmes;
• providing information on trends in the publications market in the EU countries and on the subjects likely to find the widest audience;
• providing technological supervision of publishing systems.

Tasks

The OP has a number of specific tasks, including:

• collating documents for publication;
• providing preparation, graphic design, correction, page make-up and checking of texts for publication;
• indexing and cataloguing publications;
• documentary analysis of texts published in the Official Journal and other official texts;
• consolidating legislative texts;
• managing, developing, updating and distributing the EuroVoc multilingual thesaurus;
• organising the printing of publications by the Office’s service providers;
• quality control of factors involved in production;
• distributing the Official Journal, official texts other than those published in the Official Journal and other non-mandatory publications (via EUR-Lex, EU Publications or as physical prints);
• physical and electronic archiving;
• creating, purchasing, managing, updating, monitoring and supervising the mailing lists of the institutions and creating targeted mailing lists.

Responsibilities of the institutions

• Each institution must use the services of the OP to publish their mandatory publications.
• As for non-mandatory publications, EU institutions decide on whether to use the OP services or not.
• When EU institutions publish without the involvement of the OP, they must nevertheless ask the Office for identifiers (a classification of publications in an unequivocal and exclusive way) and provide it with copies of the publications.

FROM WHEN DOES THE DECISION APPLY?

It has applied since 1 July 2009.

BACKGROUND

For more information, see:

• The Publications Office of the European Union (Europa).

MAIN DOCUMENT

Decision 2009/496/EC, Euratom of the European Parliament, the Council, the Commission, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions of 26 June 2009 on the organisation and operation of the Publications Office of the European Union (OJ L 168, 30.6.2009, pp. 41-47)

Successive amendments to Decision 2009/496/EC have been incorporated into the original document. This consolidated version is of documentary value only.

last update 15.12.2017