Modelling Inventory and Knowledge Management System of the European Commission (MIDAS) : opening to the public and recent developments

MIDAS is a scientific information system developed and managed by the Competence Centre on Modelling (CC-MOD) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. In the framework of the Better Regulation policy, MIDAS directly contributes to the Commission's commitment to transparent evidence-based policy support. First developed in 2013 and rolled out to the entire Commission in 2017, MIDAS includes information about the models used to support the policy cycle. Since 2017, the Better Regulation Guidelines and Toolbox (European Commission 2017) strongly recommends that models used in Commission's impact assessments are described in MIDAS. In 2019, MIDAS was made accessible to the European Parliament to support the analysis of the Commission's policy proposals. MIDAS was opened to the public in 2020. This step aimed at helping stakeholders and the society at large to understand the Commission's work on impact assessments, as stated in the 2021 BR Communication (European Commission 2021). Therefore, over the past two years, MIDAS has had to undergo some transformations to adapt to changing requirements. In parallel, its technical infrastructure has developed to reflect these changes. The purpose of this document is thus twofold: on the one side, to report how the MIDAS opening to the public contributed to the Better Regulation policy; on the other, to provide an up-to-date description of the technical architecture and functionality, complementing and updating the information included in the MIDAS JRC technical report published in 2019.