Release calendar

How to manage the release calendars

1. Online release calendars

1.1. Overview

While Eurostat disseminates a rich mix of statistical products, tailored for different user groups, first data releases occupy a special place in this mix due to their importance for the users. The main first data releases use dissemination and communication packages tailored for the specific topic and its target audiences. These dissemination packages may include a news item, one or more Statistics Explained articles, publications, visualisation tools, social media posts, webinars or other products

A key factor in the success of Eurostat's Dissemination programme is the establishment of an annual release calendar. The annual release calendar is built around the first data releases for the coming year.

Both an Eurostat release calendar and the specific Euro indicators release calendar are available on the Eurostat website:

Both calendars manage releases with the same overall structure and attributes. The structure allows to specify whether a release is about a euro indicator or not.

 Behind the scene
Releases are stored in web contents available in a dedicated site of Eurostat website. Please look at the paragraph about "Storage" for more details.

For readability, this document will refer to the releases in these calendars as "items".

1.2. Key concepts

One item in the calendar is a release package about one topic (usually, a data indicator - in which case it will contain a data release; but it can also be a webinar, an event, etc. on a certain topic). Each item (or release package) is made up of one or more releases of different categories - for instance on a certain data indicator, in addition to the data release there can be a news item released on the same day, a Statistics Explained article and an event as well (see paragraph 2, Items Definition, for a full list of release categories). 

If the release package is about a data indicator which belongs to the list of Euro indicators defined here: Information on data - Euro indicators - Eurostat (europa.eu) then the calendar item is considered a euro indicator and it will be displayed also in the Euro indicators calendar.

 What makes a calendar item a "euro indicators"?
To mark a calendar item as a euro indicator, a checkbox in the item structure is used. Please look at paragraph 2, "Items definition", for more details.
A "Euro indicator release" as you can see below for the "Industrial production" calendar item, is a specific type of news release that is issued about certain euro indicators. Not all the euro indicators will have this type of release (some will simply have just a data release).

Once the release date & time has passed, each release in an item will become a link (except the data releases). Clicking on it will take the users to a list of search results filtered on the date, theme and type of release - which usually gives only one result. More info about this in paragraph 5.