About this service

The RAPID database contains all the press releases of the Commission since 1985, the great majority of them in at least two languages. It also contains press releases of some of the other European Institutions, particularly the Council of the Union.

Press releases of the Commission are available in at least English and French (the working languages of the Commission’s Press Room) the day of publication. Documents from the Council of the Union and the Economic and Social Committee are loaded into the database when they are transmitted to the Commission.

All documents within RAPID are available without using a personal username. The advantage of obtaining and using a username is that you can personalise your environment, in particular choosing which languages to choose by default. A personal username will also be necessary to subscribe to press releases.

All recent Commission press releases can be accessed either by the link "Recent Press Releases" which gives the documents of the previous seven days or by the "Topics" drop down list which gives all Commission press releases since September 1999 subdivided by subject.

To search for older press releases or to search for more detailed information, a query form is available which gives access to the full content of the database since 1985.

The main area of the query form is the Search by date zone which by default is set to the previous three months. A radio button permits the selection of the whole database.

A collection of optional criteria are offered:

–      Reference of the document. If this is known, you can find the document immediately. Remember to select the whole database in the Search by date zone if the press release is more than three months old.

–      The Title and Text fields. These fields allow you to carry out a full text search on the title and text fields. Finding a word in the title is likely to produce more pertinent results than finding the same word in the text field. The text field also includes the title.
You can search for several terms in these fields by using the following syntax:

–      “european commission” will find the exact term;

–      european + commission will find both words in the same text but not necessarily adjacent;

–      european commission will find either european or commission in the same text.

–      Keywords. Documents are indexed using a structured keyword list. You can see parts of this list by choosing “See list of Keywords” and typing a word in the text box and then Browse by Expression. This will present a list of keywords which contains that word. You can also see the hierarchy of keywords by typing the code associated with a keyword (eg EXTREL is the code for External Relations) and Browsing by Key.

–      Profiles. You have the possibility to save queries which you use regularly so that they can be re-executed easily. These stored queries can also be used for email subscription.

You can also sort the results by date or document type.

Sign up for Username: To personalise your environment within RAPID, you will need a personal username. This form allows you to obtain one.

Subscribe: You can now subscribe to all or part of the daily additions to the database. This page, which requires a personal username to access, allows you to personalise your environment, working language, order of preferences for language versions of texts and several questions concerning email:

–      Which selections you wish to receive;

–      Your email address;

–      Which format you want;

–      If the format would include several attachments (*.doc, *.pdf), do you want to receive them in a zip file.

You can cancel your subscription by choosing NONE as a selection.