Faster Publication of Tenders, February 2005

From the start of 2005 the Publications Office has shortened the publication times for TED, both online and in the CD-ROM version. Data is now made available to licence holders from 4am on Tuesday through to Saturday. This information is available to the public five hours later at 9am via the TED database at http://ted.publications.eu.int, while commercial versions of the database, such as Context's Tenders service, have their own updating schedule - generally earlier than the Publications Office 's 9am deadline. See Context's website at http://www.tenders.co.uk for more details. Data prepared for publication on a Monday afternoon is now available from 4am the following day. This has a particular impact in speeding up access to information about accelerated procedures which are notified immediately prior to a weekend.

The CD-ROM produced twice weekly was previously sent out on a Wednesday and Saturday. It is now distributed on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. Each includes notices of the day before and the four previous issues. Older TED notices are available online for five years and can be found by selecting the “search in the archive” option.

Additional information is now being supplied to licence holders that was previously only available on the TED website. Where the details are supplied, a new field (IA) containing either a URL or an e-mail address is now being passed on. In practice in TED this field has not been directly searchable and the contents can only be picked up through a general text search.

Following legislative changes new document formats are due to be published from January 2005, though the new forms are not expected to be available until May or June. In the meantime these records are being published as “manual documents” and can be searched using the free text search option. Once the new forms become available on the SIMAP site at http://simap.eu.int it will be possible to bring in the new codes and fields and use the precise search possibilities that this will offer.

There have been a number of other recent modifications to the tenders data that affect database searches. With effect from 19th October 2004 the new language versions of the Common Procurement Vocabulary have been available. Maltese is the sole exception and is not expected to be available for another three years. English is being used as an alternative in the meantime.

From the same date the new NUTS (Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) code for all the EU25 countries came into use. This is not a main searchable field and in practice it does not actually appear in most records.

A new code now applies for documents published under the EU agreement with Switzerland on public procurement. Switzerland's documents were previously published under the GATT agreement but can now be identified by searching in the Regulation (RP) field for the format 'S- Agreement between the European Community and the Swiss Confederation'.

Finally a new display format, 'Document family', now allows users to look at documents related to a specific record, i.e. belonging to the same family. The new 'Document family' tab is located below the 'Data' tab but only appears when there are relevant documents available. The documents are displayed in a tree. Users can navigate through it and view selected items.