Annual Management Report
A year in facts and figures
2023
Executive summary
The Annual Management Report - Executive summary is also available in PDF
The Annual Management Report is available in PDF
Foreword
Interview with
Petr BLÍŽKOVSKÝ
Secretary-General of the European Committee of the Regions and Chair of the Management Committee of the Publications Office
Question | In 2023 the European Committee of the Regions was unanimously re‑confirmed as the Chair of the Management Committee for another two years. What aspects of the Office’s activities would you like to see further enhanced in the upcoming term of the renewed mandate?
Petr Blížkovský | In the past two years we saw that considerable progress has been achieved towards digital transformation, interoperability, data visualisation and fostering interinstitutional synergies, and we would certainly see these aspects further strengthened in the upcoming years as well. The Management Committee endorsed the Office’s report on the implementation of the current set of strategic objectives, which concludes that these objectives are and remain relevant for the Office. At the same time, the Office is increasingly becoming a centre of excellence for data, information, and knowledge management, in addition to being an interinstitutional provider of publishing services, and this change needs to be reflected in the formulation of the updated strategic objectives. The Management Committee is committed to fully supporting the Office’s excellent work on standardization of metadata and digital formats, the progress made in the field of utilizing artificial intelligence, and the shift from paper publications to digital publications.
Question | 2023 was again a challenging year on the international scene. How do you see the Office’s contributions to strengthening European democracy?
Petr Blížkovský | Indeed, while 2022 was a difficult year, the year 2023 surpassed the previous one in complexity, in many ways. The geopolitical situation became even more difficult, and climate change kept accelerating. The rapid technological change around us equally brought new challenges, but also opened up new opportunities.
Our Union has brought peace, cooperation and solidarity to the European continent and beyond, based on common values: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.
Democracy and the future of the EU remain one of the top priorities for the European Committee of the Regions, that celebrates the 30th anniversary of its establishment in 2024. It will be a year in which significant contributions can be made to strengthening the democratic achievements and progress on our continent. Citizens will participate in the elections for the European Parliament in June, and elections are taking place in several EU Member States as well. Democracy starts at local level, cities and regions are the closest to and most trusted by the people. This is where I see the role of the Office in helping us in bringing Europe closer to people. Having easy access to trustworthy EU data and information in an accessible and reusable format, in the language our citizens speak, is particularly important in this context. Our publications help to raise awareness about why the elections matter and to further encourage EU citizens to vote. Moreover, the Publications Office’s trustworthy databases, research results, open data, publications are all valuable sources to support local representatives and citizens alike.
Interview with
Hilde HARDEMAN
Director-General of the Publications Office of the European Union
Question | What were the highlights of the Office’s activities in 2023?
Hilde Hardeman | That is definitely the completion of the Official Journal act-by-act project, marking a historic shift in the way in which we publish the Official Journal of the European Union and hence give it legal effect. As from 1 October 2023, all acts are published individually as soon as they are available, no longer as part of a gazette (as was the case when the Official Journal had to be printed). This allows us to work in a faster, simpler, and more flexible way, and makes it even easier for the public to have access to the information they are looking for.
I would also highlight the transition to the new eForms for public procurement that will facilitate interoperability and reuse of data; the launch of the corporate EC data catalogue we put in place for the European Commission, allowing to record, search and access data assets in one single place; and the Office’s contribution to reviewing and streamlining reporting requirements that result from the Union’s legislation, using AI.
I am further proud that by the end of June 2023, we were able to deliver half a million copies of three schoolbooks for children in Ukraine, as part of a project with the Ukrainian authorities under the Erasmus+ programme. The Office had these books printed through its framework contracts, took care of copyright related issues, and then organized to have the books delivered to Ukraine. Following the success of this project to make sure that children in Ukraine have the schoolbooks they need, it will be continued in 2024, at a larger scale, with eight more titles and over 1 million additional copies.
Question | On a strategic level, the implementation of the current strategic objectives is soon coming to an end. Based on the past years, where does the Office stand regarding this implementation and which directions do you consider likely to be emphasized for the future?
Hilde Hardeman | Our current strategic objectives have helped to steer our work in line with political priorities, legal requirements, and technological opportunities. The merit for turning our strategic objectives into life goes to our excellent team, my colleagues’ professionalism, creativity, and daily hard work.
This year, in 2024, we will be making a proposal to the Management Committee for updated strategic objectives for the five years beyond 2025. The updated strategic objectives should reflect our shift towards digital and data, pay particular attention to interoperability and data visualisation, and further foster interinstitutional synergies. We will also pay special attention to the changing societal communication pattern that is rapidly shifting from paper publications to digital, with new channels and modes. Leveraging new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, brings new challenges as well as opportunities that we must take into account in full.
Looking to the future, to allow the public to make the most of all the services we deliver, we intend to focus on three key cross-cutting objectives that are relevant for all we do: further strengthen client-orientation; step up outreach and communication to further increase the uptake and impact of our work; and make the most of the opportunities that artificial intelligence can bring to offer new and better services.
Executive summary
Main achievements
Management of the Publications Office of the European Union
2023 was another challenging year for the Publications Office of the European Union (the Office), marked by a further worsening of the geopolitical situation and continued pressure on democratic values. Economic perspectives remained uncertain, with persistent pressure on resources. The speed of technological change, in particular in the area of artificial intelligence, represented additional challenges as well as opportunities, which the Office has done its utmost to seize. The Office continued to face a high workload in responding to EU institutions’ demands for impactful publishing services. Its activities as a centre of excellence for data, information and knowledge management continued developing considerably. Against a background of rising disinformation, its role as provider of trustworthy data and information further increased in importance.
The need to ensure seamless, secure delivery of top-quality services led the Office to reassess its delivery models, highlighting the need for simplification and streamlining wherever possible. Defining how best to use resources to optimise the added value and impact of the Office’s work for its institutional clients and for citizens and businesses was a key concern. Ensuring that the Office is an attractive, motivating and fulfilling workplace for its staff, along with bringing in new colleagues, was given top priority.
A limited restructuring was proposed and confirmed in 2023, with three aims: (1) to ensure that the Office remains fit for the future and can deliver the highest possible added value in a rapidly evolving technological and societal context; (2) to further optimise internal synergies; and (3) to make the most of the fact that for the first time in more than 5 years, the Office has a complete senior management team, which allows the organisation to be further reinforced along four major strands: cross-cutting services and solutions for data, information and knowledge management; production services; access to and reuse of public information through specific outlets (e.g. EUR-Lex, Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), data.europa.eu, the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS); and corporate services and stakeholder relations. The new organigramme has been effective since 1 February 2024.
2023 saw the Office moving to its new premises, the energy-efficient Mercier-Post building.
Strategic objectives
The steady implementation of the seven strategic objectives, which combine the mission of the Office as a provider of publishing and data management services with a clearly defined role in support of EU policymaking, continued throughout 2023, as highlighted below.
Digital european legal space
The Office made further progress in bringing EU and national law closer to people, making it easier to navigate, contextualise and search, eliminating several barriers to smooth navigation in the digital European legal space.
EUR-Lex - open a new tab. was enriched with new search, navigation and display functionalities for both Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) acts and EU case-law. To further improve the findability of all documents related to a specific case of the Court of Justice of the European Union, a new visual timeline was developed. The texts of national transposition measures for two more Member States are now published on EUR-Lex; altogether, transposition measures for 18 Member States can now be consulted via EUR-Lex. In addition, the Office started building a new search on N-Lex based on the European legislation identifier (ELI). It will offer an alternative and richer way to access national legal databases from the N-Lex portal, based on ELI metadata.
The work on the Joint Legislative Portal (JLP), the future interinstitutional gateway to information on the state of play of legislative files, has progressed substantially. The first version of the portal is planned to open to the public in April 2024.
Public procurement data space
The Office continued its work towards the European public procurement space. With a view to obtaining and offering access to public procurement data that is structured and standardised, the Office focused on consolidating the implementation of eForms (standard forms used by public buyers to publish notices on the TED – Official Journal 7 Publications Office of the European Union Supplement – website). At the end of 2023, 24 Member States were using eForms, and most notices published in TED used the new format. The use of standard forms will facilitate interoperability and reuse of data. This is very helpful when dealing with information that needs to be published at both national and European level.
The new website for TED is ready and has been in production since January 2024. It publishes both current standard procurement forms and eForms. It offers easier, more user-friendly access to public procurement data and to bulk data. It also allows for the extraction of statistical data and provides enhanced search and an improved display of results.
The Office has further proceeded with the projects launched as part of the preparatory action on transparency in public procurement , built around four axes: data quality; data readability; data interoperability; and data availability. This included a contest to reward academic articles related to transparency, the promotion of research projects and the development of the TED Semantic Web Service which converts TED data into linked open data based on the eProcurement ontology. Since August 2023, data related to awarded contracts has been uploaded to the Cellar, the semantic data public repository of the Office, paving the way for the future Public Procurement Data Space.
The Office catered for the community of users of its various services related to publishing procurement. To facilitate the transition to eForms and to the new TED website, the Office organised a series of online meetings with eSenders, re-users of TED data and users of the eNotices2 web interface – a total of 10 workshops and webinars, on top of its usual eSenders annual seminar. The Office also organised regular meetings with experts supporting its work on the eProcurement ontology (weekly and quarterly) and the European Single Procurement Document (monthly and annual).
To help eSenders and re-users adjust to and manage the impact of the inevitable changes brought by the transition to eForms, the Office has also consolidated and published unified documentation for all the public procurement standards it creates (eForms, eProcurement ontology, European Single Procurement Document and the TED Application Programming Interfaces).
The Office started an assessment of users’ satisfaction with the new web interface for submitting procurement notices (eNotices2) and with the new layout of the procurement forms. Based on users’ feedback, the Office will implement the necessary changes to improve the new eForms publication workflow and help national eSenders and reusers in their transition to eForms.
The systems managing the publication workflow used thus far continued to operate in parallel in order to support the ‘old’ forms, until they are no longer legally valid at the end of the transition period for eForms (1).
European open data space
The European open data space provides services that connect data providers and data reusers. The official portal for European data, data. europa.eu - open a new tab., is the central point of access to open data, connecting data from various public administrations. To better understand users and their needs, and thus set up more efficient citizen-centric services, the Office carried out its yearly user survey. To engage with this community, 27 data stories were published.
To support the communication and visualisation of data, two interactive guides were published on data.europa.eu: The Data in Publications guide and the DataViz guide.
The portal was completely redesigned to a harmonised europa.eu design to also align the portal with other websites of the Office and of the European Union. New functionalities and more detailed documentation make it easier to use, understand and navigate the data and information provided on the portal and to send, update and delete datasets quickly via the portal application programming interface. The new functionalities include data visualisation previews for geospatial and tabular data, the embedding of datasets on other websites with a short code snippet and a more powerful data citation tool with more options to export the citation. The new portal version is more accessible and loads datasets faster.
The metadata quality dashboard provides real-time feedback on the quality of the metadata of catalogues, datasets and their distributions.
There were other user-centric activities carried out in 2023 to engage with the open data community. The Open Data Café - link to a YouTube video, open a new tab. podcast series was launched, with six episodes published in 2023, presenting discussions on various topics such
as data quality, AI, legal and technical implications and the future of open data.
Following the adoption of the Data Governance Act (2), the European Register for Protected Data held by the Public Sector, which the act provides for, was established on data.europa.eu. This was accompanied by the issuing of
technical guidelines to explain to Member States how to harvest the data concerned by the act. Two face-to-face
workshops were organised in Slovenia and Denmark to offer a discussion forum on open data initiatives in Europe
between national public administrations. In terms of data literacy, the data.europa academy - open a new tab. continued to offer
learning material to help make society more data literate. In total, 22 webinars were organised over the year, with
an average of 310 participants.
Interinstitutional legal publications support
The act-by-act publication of the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) successfully started on 1 October. With the act-by-act publication of the OJ, acts are no longer combined and published together as a gazette. Instead, each act is published as soon as it is ready for publication, independently of other acts. This allows for a more flexible, faster and simplified way of publishing. The Office carried out a communication campaign towards all stakeholders to heighten their awareness of this important change.
Furthermore, 2023 has seen a record high in the production of the Official Journal: For the first time in history, more than 2 million pages have been published in all official languages.
The Office continued its work on the Interinstitutional Budget Information System (IBIS) to support the EU’s annual budgetary procedure. During the year, the Publications Office organised two elaborate tests with the European Parliament as part of the overall development of IBIS. These tests have shown that a number of points need to be carefully assessed. The Office is working to design an appropriate way forward and has taken the necessary steps to ensure business continuity. The Publications Office is committed to ensuring a fully functioning system at all times.
Optimised publishing services
The Office offers production services for a wide range of output formats, from the identification and production of publications to the distribution and preservation of the finalised products. To complement these services and support authors to increase publications’ impact, the Office further enriched its service offer of pre- and post-production services, to provide advice starting from the programming and planning phase of a publication to the analysis of its performance.
Editorial advice and performance measurement are two of the new services and are now available to all institutions. Support and guidelines for publishing documents in an accessible manner have been further developed in 2023 and are available in the form of a website, training modules and a drafting tool.
As domain leader in the field of publications, the Office has created a professionalisation and engagement programme for the publishing community of practice consisting of all institutions. In 2023, the offer of e-learning modules and tutorials has been enriched in line with authors’ needs, and activities around topics of shared interest have been organised to share knowledge and best practices.
Standardisation services for interoperability
The beginning of the year was marked by the publication of a new version of Akoma Ntoso for EU (AKN4EU) under the auspices of the Interinstitutional Metadata and Formats Committee (IMFC) coordinated by the Office. In March 2023 the Office successfully delivered automated conversion and validation services relating to AKN4EU, a development that was welcomed by the Interinstitutional Interoperability Steering Committee and considered an important asset. On the metadata side of standardisation, the EU institutions agreed on important standardisation steps necessary for the future implementation of the JLP.
The Office cemented its role as a reference data management competence centre offering a comprehensive service package. In April 2023, the European Commission’s Information Management Steering Board (IMSB) confirmed the maturity of this service package as a corporate offering within the Commission. The Office further took an active part in ensuring a prominent place for corporate reference data policy in the rolling action plan of the IMSB and coordinated the related activities: together with Eurostat, the Office contributed to the successful definition and publication of one corporate list for country and territory codes and names replacing the 75 different lists previously used in the Commission. The list, endorsed by the IMSB, should be used in new IT systems from September 2023 on, while Directorates-General (DGs) and entities are encouraged to align their existing systems. The Office was also requested to design a corporate taxonomy to be used by all DGs in SharePoint Online and successfully delivered on this request.
The Interinstitutional Style Guide (ISG) has undergone an essential content update supporting the institutions in correctly preparing legislative documents for publishing in the Official Journal act-by-act, which poses somewhat different requirements than the previous mode of publishing the Official Journal as a gazette. The EU institutions welcomed new outreach activities of the ISG, which took place in the new premises of the Office and online and attracted over 400 participants.
The Office, jointly with DG Digital Services and with support from the Interoperable Europe - open a new tab. unit, organised the second edition of the European Data Conference on Reference Data and Semantics (ENDORSE 2023). The conference took place in March 2023 and focused on practical use cases of reference data and semantic technologies in a multilingual context.
Connecting and preserving knowledge and content
The European Commission Library further enhanced its role as a key actor providing data, research and information management services in support of evidence-based policymaking. Among the main achievements in 2023 are the conclusion of a major interinstitutional framework contract for the provision of subscriptions to general and international press, further rationalisation of acquisitions at the Commission and interinstitutional level, new library research products in support of evidence transparency in the policymaking process, and the launch of the EC Data Catalogue enabling the discovery of key data assets in the Commission and its executive agencies to underpin evidence-based policymaking and internal operations.
The launch of the Evidence Transparency Service, to help ensure that evidence used in impact assessments and evaluations is easy to identify, access, retrieve and (re)use in line with the institutional commitments for transparency, was endorsed by the IMSB in June 2023. The service is now in its initial operational phase. A communication strategy is underway to publicise the service.
Service offer of the Publications Office of the European Union
Centred around these seven strategic objectives, the Office provides a range of services for the production, access to, reuse and long-term preservation of public information and data. With the help of data visualisation, the graph below sets out in an easily understandable way the full range of services which the Office provides to the EU institutions and to the public.
2023 Highlights
Connecting and preserving content and knowledge
- Launch of the Evidence Transparency Service.
- Launch of the EC Data Catalogue.
Standardisation services for interoperability
- Corporate list for country and territory codes and names replacing 75 lists previously used in the Commission endorsed by the IMSB.
- 500 + participants from 50 + countries attending the ENDORSE conference on reference data and semantics.
Optimised publishing services
- Successful Interinstitutional Digital Publishing Conference 2023 ‘Do you reach your audience?’.
- 304 reports under the Office’s publications’ performance measurement services, indicating a growing demand across EU Institutions.
Digital european legal space
- A complete new set of functionalities made available on EUR-Lex to consult acts published in the Official Journal.
- Joint Legislative Portal: developments started and progressed significantly.
Public procurement data space
- eForms for procurement notices: implemented.
- TED Semantic Web Service for public procurement data access and reuse: launched.
European open data space
- European Register for Protected Data held by the Public Sector available on data.europa.eu.
- 27 data stories and six Open Data Café podcast episodes published.
Interinstitutional legal publications support
- Successful implementation of the act-by-act publication of the Official Journal.
- Record number of Official Journal pages published.
Key facts and figures for 2023
About this publication
Printed by the Publications Office of the European Union in Luxembourg
Manuscript completed in March 2024
The European Commission is not liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this publication.
Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2024
© European Union, 2024
The Commission’s reuse policy is implemented by Commission Decision 2011/833/EU of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents (OJ L 330, 14.12.2011, p. 39, ELI - open a new tab.). Unless otherwise noted, the reuse of this document is authorised under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence - open a new tab.. This means that reuse is allowed, provided appropriate credit is given and any changes are indicated.
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The Annual Management Report 2023 - Publications Office of the European Union
Print ISBN 978-92-78-43968-2 doi:10.2830/84945 OA-02-24-046-EN-C
PDF ISBN 978-92-78-43969-9 doi:10.2830/82428 OA-02-24-046-EN-N
HTML ISBN 978-92-78-43970-5 doi:10.2830/527062 OA-02-24-046-EN-Q