ECHA publishes updated Guidance on data sharing

ECHA/NA/12/08
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Media enquiries: ECHA Press

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has published an update to the Guidance on data sharing following the conclusion of the consultation process

Helsinki, 03 April 2012 - The Guidance on data sharing was one of the first guidance documents published by ECHA in 2007 and required an update to take account of the learnings ECHA has made since the conclusion of the first registration deadline. Several corrections and improvements to the document were needed to clarify the duties and roles of the involved actors and to reflect its experience in implementing the data sharing processes.

Accordingly, the ECHA Secretariat prepared a draft revision of the guidance document which underwent a full consultation with ECHA partners. The text has been throroughly revised amending both content and structure. The content has been reviewed with the aim to improve the overall coherence and to focus the scope to Title III of the REACH Regulation on data sharing and avoidance of unnecessary testing. Furthermore, information already covered by technical manuals or falling under the scope of other guidance documents has been removed, reduced or amended in order to minimise overlapping and ensure consistency.

The structure has also been altered to make the document clearer and more readable by creating two new sections covering a comprehensive set of information on the data sharing process for respectively phase-in and non-phase-in substances. New sections on the data sharing dispute processes were also added and all the existing examples have been improved or replaced by new ones. A new section addressing post-registration data sharing obligations has also been developed.