Developments in European information issues: Networks and relays – Services – Products, May 2003

EUR-Lex prepares for enlargement

The procedures to be followed to make freely available the body of Community legislation in force in the languages of the acceding countries prior to the enlargement date of May 2004 are outlined in a Council document dated 13 May 2003. The Special Editions of the Official Journal will be published gradually, but pending full integration into EUR-Lex the authenticated texts will be accessible through a separate page entitled 'Secondary legislation in the languages of the candidate countries'. This will link in turn to a page for each acceding country. Though the texts will be in the new languages, the navigation tools will for the meantime be in English. The new pages will be reached via a button labelled 'Preparing Enlargement' on the home page of each of the current official languages. At time of writing this is not yet available. Once the complete body of legislation has been published and is fully incorporated into the database, the temporary link will be discontinued.

While it might have been expected that the texts would be released by the Legal Services of the Council and Commission in chronological order or by chapter of the Directory of Legislation in Force, in fact this is not the case. Documents will be added gradually to the different chapters as available. However a table is to be produced showing which texts are available in which language.

Irish users of EUR-Lex will be interested to see that although Irish is not one of the existing official languages, the texts of the Treaties have now been added to the site at http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/ga/treaties/index.html in HTML, PDF and TIF.

OJ Daily from Context

Context has launched a daily EU update service called OJ Daily on http://www.justis.com/database/oj_daily.html. It contains the table of contents of the Official Journal L and C series and is updated every working day. This searchable service is thus more up to date that the official CELEX database which is updated weekly. Looking like the front cover of the print version, the contents pages provide hyperlinks to the full text. Users can set up an e-mail alert service to receive notification when a relevant document is added. It can also be cross-searched with Justis CELEX and Justis OJ C databases, or the Justis J-Link feature can be used to link from references in OJ Daily to the full text in other sources. OJ Daily contains data from 1998 to the present. For single user access the annual subscription rate is £450, but subscribers to Justis CELEX are offered a special discounted rate of £275.

However, it is hard to justify such expenditure. Though the EU's CELEX database is only updated weekly, EUR-Lex is updated daily and gives access to the same contents page information. EUR-Lex is also searchable, though perhaps without the sophistication and additional J-link features of Context's database. Additionally if the attraction is the e-mail alert service to avoid having to make a point of visiting EUR-Lex daily, the Office for Official Publications provides one free. It does not send notification of the addition of relevant documents, but it does e-mail a link to the contents pages of each of that day's issues of the Official Journal. It is quick and easy to scan and link to the full PDF text of anything of interest. To subscribe to the free service from EUR-Lex, e-mail system.eur-lex@opoce.cec.eu.int. All the information you need to supply is your e-mail address and the language in which you would like to receive the OJ Tables of Contents.

For more details of Context's service visit http://www.justis.com/database/oj_daily.html or contact the company on: Tel: +44 (0)20-7267-8989