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Taking effect from 1 January 2010 the content of public sector's websites will be available in open formats. This new regulation will contribute to enhancing equal accessibility of users and suppliers to the information available on the websites of both central and local government.

In the light of this initiative, the Minister of Government Administration and Reform, Ms. Rigmor Aasrud, assured that, with this new regulation, users or suppliers seeking for information in the public sector's websites will not be obliged to use a specific software anymore. This will help users to have equal access to public information, while establishing fairer competition conditions among software suppliers.

Under the new regulations, all public websites should use HTML as the primary format for publishing contents on their websites. Portable Document Format (PDF) version 1.4 or newer ones, or PDF / A - ISO 19005-1, are required to be used in case the original look of the document needs to be preserved. Open Document Format (ODF) (ISO / IEC 26300) can be used for publishing documents that contain forms that need to be filled in. Other formats can be used as a supplement to the required standards.

Since 1 January 2009, all governmental agencies are required to comply with the requirements of the Reference Catalogue of IT standards for the public sector, version 1.0. According to the new regulation, the same requirements now apply to the municipal sector too. The reference catalogue is regularly updated with new IT standards. The Reference Catalogue version 2.0 has already been adopted by the government and has set new mandatory IT standards for video, audio, graphics and image content available on the public sector's websites.

The new standards and the future ones that will be agreed by the government will be incorporated into the regulations through annual audits.