Product safety requirements in ONIX: Advice worth reading from EDItEUR

To support their detailed ONIX documentation, international standards organization EDItEUR releases Application Notes. These notes are short white papers that look in-depth at a single ONIX topic that users are asking about or that EDItEUR is aware can be problematic.

You can see and download the full list of Application Notes here, but we thought we'd take the opportunity to highlight a new release, Product safety requirements in ONIX 3, for your reading pleasure.

Policy wonks will have been following the news coming out of the European Union (EU) regarding the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) that came into effect on December 13, 2024. These rules compel anyone selling products into the European Economic Area (which includes the 27 countries of the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein). The new rules mandate that nearly every product, even those one would generally consider to be “safe,” such as books, must adhere to the Regulation if that product is to be sold in in the European Economic Area.

If you are a publisher and you are producing books that are sold in the European Economic Area, you must:

• carry out a risk assessment;

• retain technical information relating to conducted safety testing; and

• provide contact details — including both electronic and postal addresses — of a legal entity within the EU which is responsible for responding to issues or enquiries about product safety.

Of note for Canadian publishers and suppliers is the last point on the list: Canadian companies must assign an EU-based entity to serve as the appointed representative. Generally speaking, this could be a sales or distribution partner charged with fulfillment in the European Economic Area, another publishing activities partner, or any EU-based representative who can act on behalf of the publisher for the purposes of safety inquiries. Many Canadian publishers should expect to be in conversation with their EU representatives already, before the GPSR came into effect, as they will be the primary point of contact for their retail partners in the European Economic Area.

If you’re wondering about EDItEUR’s interest in the GSPR, wonder no more: in anticipation of publishers' needs, folks at EDItEUR have engaged in a year of rapid growth of the ONIX standard, advances which were made to support GPSR compliance. Graham Bell at EDItEUR writes:

ONIX users can deliver the necessary contact details in one of three places in an ONIX Product record:

in <ProductContact> in Block 4 for the publisher;

in <ProductContact> in Block 6 for an in-EU local publisher/sales agent or other publisher representative; or

for an importer / EU distributor using the more-or-less identical <SupplyContact> in Block 6.

In ONIX 3.1, the above contact details can include postal addresses. There are details in the release notes for 3.1 revision 2.

In ONIX 3.0, they cannot. However, there is a temporary workaround for those still using 3.0, using <SupportingResource> with <ResourceContentType> code 53, and linking to a simple text file containing the necessary contact details.

As noted, this workaround for 3.0 is temporary, and not as effective as delivering address details in structured form using release 3.1. Not all recipients will accept the workaround.  For publishers using ONIX 3.0, this may provide an incentive to update to release 3.1 – the update is relatively simple and in many cases would require little more than a change in the release and xmlns attributes attached to the <ONIXMessage> tag (a handful of fields from 3.0 were removed from 3.1, but they were very rarely used by either senders or data recipients and are extremely unlikely to cause any issues). Of course, senders should consult with recipients to ensure they are ready to accept 3.1. There are more details in the release notes for ONIX 3.1.

The new Product safety requirements in ONIX 3 EDItEUR Application Note is an excellent, just-in-time resource for publishers looking towards GPSR compliance and support through their product metadata.