EFSA at a glance (original) (raw)

1

Receipt of mandate/application

EFSA receives request for scientific advice (from European Commission, European Parliament or Member States) or initiates its own activity.

A mandate is agreed, including terms of reference and deadline; for market applications, EFSA checks/validates their completeness and may request more scientific information from the applicant.

The mandate is assigned to one of EFSA’s scientific panels or its Scientific Committee and made available on the OpenEFSA portal.

2

Assessment

The risk assessment is usually carried out by an expert working group, which reviews the scientific information available, and may draw on EFSA’s data collection networks or launch an open call for data.

The working group develops a draft and submits it to the panel for discussion.

EFSA often holds public consultations on draft outputs to consider the comments in the revised document.

3

Adoption & publication

The assessment is adopted by a majority of panel members – with any minority opinion recorded – at a plenary meeting of the relevant panel.

The output – which is usually a scientific opinion, but may be a statement, guidance document or other type of output – is published in the EFSA Journal, our open-access, online scientific journal.

The publication may be accompanied by communication activities.