Delving into the pre-IMMC world, we notice that contractors relied on sending pre-formatted OJEEP messages to the OP to transfer metadata and files in the context of OJ publications, while institutions sent documents via email (with no or widely varying quality levels with regards to metadata).
With no standardised way of exchanging information across institutions, institutions relied on their own set of tools to disseminate information. As the tools were characterised by a diverse set of proprietary metadata for documents and events, programming/configuring IS to process this information would prove impossible, meaning that machines would not be able to efficiently talk to each other (being interoperable) and leading information to be validated manually. Moreover, very few institutions had formalised specific contracts with regards to data exchanges, meaning that receivers would not know a-priori what metadata they would receive (if any).
For the receiver, this way of dealing with document flows was extremely time-consuming as they had to sift through the various documents and manually verify documents and the widely differing formats of metadata (checking for coherency and completeness).
Although tailoring OJEEP to the institutions could have been a solution, this activity would prove arduous and resource intensive. Indeed, although OJEEP messages were structured to a certain extent, they only catered to flows with regards to contractors and the OP and had not been built for flexibility or scalability.
And thus the quest to find another way of exchanging standardised information across (multiple) bodies, began. Searching for a way to reduce uncertainty, a-priori prescribed contracts would allow each user to send and receive messages in a pre-formatted manner and would allow the receiver to know what they would receive from the sender. The receiver (together with OP) would subsequently create a schema (the implementation of the prescribed contract) to allow information systems to process messages (and could also configure IS as to perform some automatic validation).
In 2011, the IMMC agreement set out the minimum requirements of the set of metadata to be sent along with the disseminated content in the legal domain (e.g. legislative and non-legislative procedures). Manuscripts (to be published in the OJ) and legal documents (to be published in EUR-LEX) would therefore have to be sent alongside the minimum set of metadata (metadata on procedures, events and their associated works, expressions and manifestations). Through the years the protocol expanded to cater for a range of activities (from the dissemination of judicial procedures to digitisation and archiving activities). Look into the timeline for further details:
