Guidance on handling charges

The underlying guidance is recommended to ECOMET Members with regard to the calculation of handling charges for the delivery of meteorological data and products from the ECOMET Catalogue.

The guidance takes account of (European) Commission Notice (2014/C 240/01) “Guidelines on recommended standard licenses, datasets and charging for the reuse of documents”, In particular section 4.1 “Marginal Cost Method”. This Notice was issued to provide guidance on the best practises in several areas regarding the re-use of Public Sector Information (PSI), include charging.

Handling charges will be fixed by the NMSs which deliver the data and products to the customers. However, this does not exclude a situation where another Member supplying data and products to the delivering Member applies a Handling Charge to cover specific delivery costs.

They include:

• The cost of acquisition of the information from the originating Member if special arrangements have to be made.
• A contribution to the investment and maintenance of existing distribution systems. The contribution should be limited to a proportional share based upon the actual use or, within reasonable limits, the anticipated use of the distribution system.
• Personnel costs of data administration: routing (initialisation and changing of distribution schemes), monitoring, acquisition of data from other centres, trouble shooting.
• Overhead costs: consultation (costs associated with communication with customers), organizing and management costs concerning handling.
• Costs of extraction of data and products in the format required by the customer.

The total handling charge shall be at a level which implies no state subsidy. The handling charge may include or exclude the telecommunication (delivery) price. In the latter case, this cost is directly paid by the customer for example to the telecommunication operator.