EUR-Lex Newsletter

Latest developments on EUR-Lex

Improvements and new features:

1. Advanced search

• new collapse all/expand all function
• clearer display for the procedure heading and enhanced results via the document reference heading in EU case-law advanced search
• more document types when searching preparatory acts collection:
• CoR opinions
• EESC opinions
• positions of the Council (together with their statements of reasons)
• more results when searching by name of court in the JURE advanced search form

2. Results list

• collapse/expand each facet group
• CELEX number moved from title to metadata (below the title) for better readability
• registered users can now export more documents

3. Document view

• permalink option added to the 'bookmark this item' function
• better info on HMTL document availability
• any linked HTML documents displayed together (e.g. documents with annexes)
• better alignment in multilingual display mode
• multilingual display available for summaries of case law and of JURE decisions
• search terms highlighted in the main body of the text, not just the title

4. European Legislation Identifier (ELI)

• ELI identifiers have been attributed to:
• regulations
• directives
• decisions
• consolidated legislation
• You can find them on the notice page for each document, under 'Title and Reference'. You can also change the ELI URI to carry out certain types of searches.
• the ELI register pages explain what the ELI is and how it has been implemented at EU and national level, and provide technical info.

5. Legislative procedures

• better display of European Parliament documents and metadata
• improved design of initial document reference in search results

6. National implementing measures

• improved labelling and display, especially for notices with more than one CELEX number, plus information on different deadlines for which the measures have been notified.

7. Other improvements

• improved PDF file of complete help pages
• navigation menu added to 'latest developments' pages

Contact us if you have any feedback or questions about these changes.

Conference on Access to and Reuse of EU Legal Information

The Publications Office of the European Union has organised the Access to and Reuse of EU Legal Information conference, which took place on the 21st of March 2016. The programme attracted more than 400 participants and featured many high-level speakers, including the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Tibor Navracsics.

Commissioner Navracsics opened the plenary session with a keynote address, in which he stressed the importance of open and transparent access to legal information for democracy and transparency. EU legislation has to be freely available in all languages of the EU as it has a direct impact on the citizens, businesses and civil society of Europe. EUR-Lex is a frontrunner in providing such access with over 9 million documents and more than 70 million visitors per year.

However, the Commissioner also looked ahead, stating that simply providing access was not enough - it is crucial that we stay up to date with technological advances such as machine-to-machine communication and the semantic web. Making EU legal data both accessible and reusable through the use of modern technologies has always been a key priority for the Publications Office.

The plenary sessions continued with further presentations focusing on case studies of EU Member States (UK), the importance of providing access to EU Law, big open data, and the experience of reusing EUR-Lex data in the past 25 years.

Following the plenary session, 3 parallel workshops took place:

• the EUR-Lex workshop,
• the Reuse workshop,
• and the ELI (European Legal Identifier) workshop.

In the EUR-Lex workshop we presented EUR-Lex in detail, focused on its features and discussed the tool used by so many. With guest speakers from academia, the private sector and EU institutions, we focused on discussing different resources of EU Law, the lifecycle of the Official Journal of the European Union, what EUR-Lex as a tool means to translators and how they use it. We also took a closer look at the whole process of adopting EU Law, from preparatory acts, until implementation measures, and discussed why access to EU Law is such an important element of democracy and transparency. In light of openness, transparency, reuse and access we must, however, continue to ensure the protection of personal data.

For more details about the event, including all the workshops, all the presentations and the recordings, please follow this link.