FAQs
In accordance with Royal Decree 181/2008, of 8 February the Boletín Oficial del Estado (Official State Gazette) is the official gazette of the Spanish State and publishes laws, provisions and acts of compulsory publication.
The Official State Gazette publishes:
The Council of Ministers may, as an exception, resolve the publications of reports, documents or official communications whose dissemination is considered to be of public interest.
Made up of two subsections:
Comprised of the provisions of compulsory publication with no legal character or apply to other sections: regulatory basis of concession of grants; prizes and other awards and subventions; service charters; collective agreements with general character; university curricula; etc.
Comprised judicial auctions and procedural acts that do not come under the Supplement of the Judicial Public Notice Board.
Grouped as follows:
Within each section, the insertion of texts is made by grouping them under the body they are issued by, according to the general order of precedence of the State. The provisions issued by the Autonomous Communities are published in accordance with the order of official publication of the Statutes of Autonomy.
Within each section, the texts are organized by hierarchical rank.
Each number of the gazette includes a summary of the content, according to the structure indicated above.
The text of laws, provisions and acts published in the BOE has official and authentic status; for their part, the texts of the rules issued by the Autonomous Communities and published in the BOE have the status given to them by the respective Statutes of Autonomy.
The laws, royal decree-laws and royal legislative decrees, once signed by the King and published in Spanish in the Official State Gazette, may also be published in the other co-official languages of the different Autonomous Communities. These publications in co-official languages are available in the form of specific supplements of the BOE, according to the respective collaboration agreements subscribed between the Central Government and the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country and Valencia.
You can access the latest published issue of the BOE from the homepage of the website www.boe.es.
The website of the day's BOE offers the summary and index of all published on that day.
The information is structured into three sections:
Under “Disposiciones y anuncios” you can select the Section or Sub-section of interest. This option is also available in the case of the Supplement of the Single Judicial Notice Board.
You can also choose to view only the provisions and announcements published by a specific Department. This option is also available for both Supplements.
Under the header of any provision, the links offered provide direct access to the pdf format and to the other formats available where applicable:
If you need to consult a recent issue of the gazette, click on the icon located on the upper right corner of scree;
To access the gazettes published on other dates, on the homepage of the website you will find access to the “Calendar” where you can browse the gazettes published from 1 September 1960 to date.
You can also click directly on the date you are looking for in the window:
At the bottom of the page, using the calendar, you can also access the supplements in co-official languages (Català, Galego, Valencià and Euskera) and the Constitutional Court Section.
Yes, the electronic edition of the "Boletín Oficial del Estado" published on the Agency's website, since 1 January 1st 2009, has character of official and authentic, with the effects provided for in the Preliminary Title of the Civil Code and other applicable regulations.
Prior to this date, only the paper edition of the "Boletín Oficial del Estado" has the consideration of official and authentic.
To guarantee the authenticity, integrity and inalterability of the contents of the BOE the electronic edition published on the Agency's website has, since 1 January 2009 included an advanced digital signature.
Said signature is included separately in each of the provisions published. This ensures the authenticity of a specific provision without having to download the full gazette.
The process of an electronic signature blocks and "freezes" the content of the document in such a manner that the alteration of same invalidates the electronic signature.
The electronic signature process is comprised of two operations:
To validated a document signed electronically, that is to confirm that no cause is altered from the signing of the document, three operations must be executed:
The method of calculating the summaries of the three properties: (a) the length is always fixed, regardless of the length of the summarised document, (b) a minimum alteration of the content of the document results in a very different summary and (c) calculating a summary is not a systematic operation: one can easily calculate the summary of a text but it is not possible to reconstruct the text based on the summary.
To validate the pdf documents of the electronic BOE, follow the instructions of the Configuration manual for the validation of the signature (PDF) and install the certificates of the Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre:
TheCVE, or electronic Verification code consists of a set of characters that uniquely identify the unique the provisions, acts and announcements published in the Official State Gazette.
This code is printed on each of the pages of each provision, act or announcement published and facilitates access to the original electronic document on the website of the Official State Gazette Agency.
Because any paper copy of the electronic originals of the Official State Gazette, since 1 January 2009, is considered official and authentic if it includes the CVE.
The CVE allows for the authenticity of any page of the Official State Gazette to be verified in printed form by matching it to the original electronic document. To do so, on the access page to the official gazette you can enter the CVE and obtain the original document, signed electronically, directly from the Agency website.
The official and authentic edition of the BOE since January, 1st 2009 is the one available in signed pdf format.
Nevertheless, the content of the different sections of the bulletin is also available in other formats for information purposes only. These other formats, although they do not have the legal value of the official and authentic signed pdf, are offered in order to facilitate citizens' Access, and favour the reuse of the legal information published. These other formats can be accessed via the daily summaries by clicking on the 'Other formats' link.
The provisions and announcements published in the newspaper are also available in html format. Each html document contains a header with the identification and publication data of the provision or announcement, as well as the link to the other formats:
For general provisions published in section I, the link is offered in e-PUB format (available since 2010), especially geared towards viewing e-book type devices.
For the conversion of ePUB documents in any format, and how they are managed and sent to any electronic reader device, we recommend the use of the fee tool Calibre(Windows, OS X, Linux): http://calibre-ebook.com/. It is also possible to view these document simply in Windows or OS X, using the free viewer Adobe, Digital Editions: http://www.adobe.com/es/products/digitaleditions/
State Agency Official State Gazette
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