Further News from Eurostat, January 2004

As reported recently, Eurostat has been offering free access to the data on its website from 6th January 2004. This change of policy has now been confirmed by an announcement on the site at http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat. Included in the free access are the publications in PDF format which were previously available for sale or could be downloaded only by subscribers or privileged users with passwords, such as European Documentation Centres. The publications which were previously available free of charge can still be accessed and additionally there are 1,000 tables of indicators on a range of subjects which can also be downloaded freely, many giving time series of data for up to a decade. Changes have now been made to the website to reflect the new policy, so users will find for example a new menu heading “Free & online”, though the data can also be accessed through alternative routes via the “Publications”, Data” and “Themes” approaches. Users should note however that the new policy does not mean free access to Eurostat's range of expensive databases such as New Cronos. The datashop network and agencies continue to handle subscriptions to these sources and to printed publications. The datashops also still provide a value added service by supplying tailored data extracted on demand from the databases in the format required by the customer.

The changes will however have an impact on the Eurostat Electronic Library on CD-ROM. This was produced monthly with an annual set, though sometimes a CD in fact covered a couple of months. For non-privileged users who purchased this service, the subscription was expensive. It was supposed to act as an archive to those PDF publications which were previously not freely available. In fact it never provided a complete archive of what had been published on the website as it was simply a snapshot of the site on a particular date (not necessarily the same date each month). Hence, depending on when an issue of a serial publication was added to the site, there could be gaps in what was captured on the CD-ROM. Without an index it was also extremely difficult to guess which CD-ROM might hold a particular issue. So as a method of archiving all Eurostat publications it was never satisfactory, even putting aside the technical difficulties with the product. Eurostat say that there are currently two more extractions planned from the website. The first is in hand and the resulting CD-ROM should be distributed in February. The final one is due in June/July. After that it will no longer be technically possible as Eurostat is planning to launch a new improved website in the summer, which will not accommodate this process. Eurostat accept that a new solution to the archiving issue must be found, but have not yet reached any conclusions. It is to be hoped that this time they go for a simple solution.