The publisher
Standards Drift publishes everything on this site. It is independently operated and self-funded.
It takes no funding, sponsorship, membership fee or payment in kind from the European Commission, from any European standardisation organisation, from any trade association, or from any company whose products fall under the regimes tracked here. There is no advertising and no paid placement. Nothing on the site is written for a client.
The archive is published under an organisational name rather than a personal one. Everything that would let you check the work is on the site already: the method is set out in full, every date and status names the list or Official Journal decision it comes from, and the full dataset is downloadable. The record should stand on its sources, not on a byline.
What is published here, and what is not
We publish what the official record said, on the date it said it. Every date and status names the list or decision it comes from, and once a monthly record closes it is never rewritten.
We do not publish forecasts. We do not publish legal advice. We do not publish a slippage figure we cannot show the receipts for. Where a date moved in the past, we reconstruct it from the instruments themselves and link each one, rather than asserting it.
The archive began capturing on 7 August 2026, and its dataset of the Commission's summary lists starts on 8 August 2026. Everything before that is reconstructed from primary sources and labelled as such.
How a fact gets onto this site
The status and dates of each standard are read by code from the Commission's summary lists, from the implementing decisions in the Official Journal (through the Publications Office) and, for standards not yet cited, from the standards bodies' public work programmes; none of them is typed in by hand. The few dates taken from legal texts rather than lists, such as the day a regulation applies or a standardisation request deadline, are entered from the instrument itself and linked to it. Every daily capture is hashed and kept, and the site is only published if a set of automatic checks passes: every reference page names its source, the main counts agree across pages, no date on a reference page differs from the list it came from, and no internal link points to a page that does not exist. Analysis pieces are the only hand-written text; each is dated and kept as published.
How to check our work
- Every source we read, with its latest fetch result and a SHA-256 hash of what it said: method, section 6, also as sources.json.
- How each status is derived from the list's own columns: method, section 4.
- Every error we have found and fixed, with what was wrong and for how long: 16 so far, the latest on 5 November 2026 (corrections).
- The data behind every page, with field definitions and JSON Schemas: dataset, archived on Zenodo with a DOI (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23544937).
How to cite this
Everything here is published under CC BY 4.0. Reuse it freely, including commercially, with attribution.
For the site as a whole:
For a specific month, cite that month's page, because it is frozen and will still say the same thing when your reader follows the link:
The underlying data is available as JSON and CSV, and changes are published as an Atom feed. Both carry the licence and the citation string inside the file.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, write to support@standardsdrift.com and say which page and which figure. Getting it right matters more to us than being first. Every confirmed error is fixed and listed on the corrections page, with what it said, what it says now and since when.
A closed monthly record is never silently edited. If one turns out to carry an error, the correction is published as a dated note on that page, saying what was wrong and when it was fixed, with the original text left visible. That is the same standard we hold the official record to.
Sources
The archive reads the European Commission's harmonised standards pages and summary lists, the Official Journal through the Publications Office, and the standards bodies' public work programmes, every day. The full source list and the capture method are on the method page. Where a source fails, the run is recorded as an error and retried, never treated as a change.