In the Summer of 2014, a working group was set up at the Ministry of Transport Information Technologies and Communications with the mandate of drafting amendments to the Bulgarian legislation regarding the introduction of the revised Directive 2013/37/EU on the Re-use of Public Sector Information of the European Parliament and the Council of 26 June 2013.
The amended Directive enlarged the scope of the re-use of public sector information by including archives, libraries and museums.
[3] Another novelty concerns the presumption of third-party consent, meaning that if a public authority asks for a third-party consent for the disclosure of requested information affecting it, the lack of response within 14 days will be presumed as consent and the information should be completely provided, Thanks to the amendment, thus, the requested information is not considered, as it was before the amendment, a dissent by the third party which obliged the public body to provide only partial access.
In line with the revised directive, the amended law extended the re-use regime by prohibiting any exclusive clauses in giving rights to use whole databases coherently with the Directive provision that obliges any public body in the EU to provide equal availability of such databases on equal conditions and with costs for accessing calculated in transparent way.
Moreover, other entities are subject to the access to information law, in particular all authorities which perform public functions prescribed by the law, named "public law entities", for instance the Electronic Media Council, the National Health Insurance Fund and the like, and individuals and legal entities financed with funds from the state budget or the European Union (both subsidies and EU projects and programmes).
Paying a fee can only be required to cover the actual costs of reproducing the document (copies, prints, etc.
[7] As for financial transparency, the report acknowledges an improvement since 2013, but still about half of the institutions do not publish their budgets on the Internet as required by the law.
[7] A good level of transparency has been registered on disclosure of information for public procurement tenders: 94% of institutions scrutinized by the AIP has a dedicated section on their websites.
[7] However, almost all institutions, around 97%, complied with the new requirement that introduced electronic applications for freedom of information requests.