Editorial Partnership
The Publications Office works with private publishers and international organisations to promote the dissemination of European Union documents other than those published directly by the European Union itself, as well as their translations, on specific markets.
This partnership mainly concerns academic publications for which the author services in certain cases prefer this specific type of production and dissemination in order to reach a well-defined target public. For this kind of project, the Office plays the role of an intermediary between the author service and the external partner.
Editorial partnership - Key publications of the European Union : catalogue 2011-2012
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Within this activity, we should distinguish two categories:
Editorial partnership with private publishers
Co-publishing with international organisations, public bodies and universities
Editorial partnership is a model where the author services provide the manuscript and the Publications Office finds a private publisher who will ensure production, marketing, sales, distribution and promotion.
The Editorial partnership's main objective is to make these publications available to the widest audience possible and on the largest range of devices (e-book bundles, rich-media publications, accessible via different media).
On 6 August 2011 the Publications Office published a notice of a call for expressions of interest with the aim to establish a list of professional publishers to be consulted for any new partnership project.
Upon the author service request for a new project, the Publications Office sends a tender file with the invitation to tender to all candidates on the list created within the framework of the call for expressions of interest or to those among them who have been selected using objective and non-discriminatory pre-qualification criteria specific to the project concerned.
Finally, based on the results of the tender, the Publications Office concludes a contract 
[147 KB] on behalf of the author service in line with the tender specifications (e.g. editorial choices, technical specifications, the respective financial contributions, task-sharing, total print run and respective shares, sales price, open access to the electronic manuscript (PDF) and e-book versions for different platforms and devices etc.).
In principle, the copyright of the final publication remains with the European Union (or any other EU agency or decentralised organisation).
The final product bears the logos and the identification codes of the Publications Office and the private publisher(s). These publications are catalogued as official EU publications.
Information about the editorial content can be provided by filling in this form [67 KB] .
Co-publishing with international organisations and public bodies is based on the principle of sharing production and dissemination costs. For this kind of project and depending on the specific situation, there can be shared copyright between the European Union and the international organisation or national public body concerned. Generally, this concerns works on topics which fall within the competences of both the European institutions and the respective international organisations or public bodies. This is therefore a cooperation concerning both the production of content and the production of the publication as such.
This publishing model brings increased visibility to the EU content or content produced with EU support (grant agreements) as these publications are distributed worldwide and also publicized on the international organizations web pages.
If you are interested in this type of cooperation agreement, please contact the Editorial Partnership section (e-mail: OP-Editorial-Partnership@publications.europa.eu).