ECHA states REACH-IT and Helpdesk availability at year end

11-25-2009: ECHA will use the Christmas break for a major upgrading of the REACH-IT submission system, which will be closed from the lunchtime of 14 December 2009 to 3 January 2010 inclusive. The Helpdesk and ECHA’s offices will be closed from 24 December to 3 January inclusive. By lunchtime of 4 January 2010, REACH-IT will re-open and be available for submissions 24 hours a day during the working week – from 8.00 Monday until 19.00 Friday

Dossier submission via REACH-IT needs to be temporarily suspended over the Christmas break to allow ECHA to migrate to a new version of the REACH-IT software. A similar suspension was also executed last year. This new version is an essential part of the ongoing programme to enhance the performance of the software to sustain the extraordinary volumev of registrations expected in 2010. The changes will also ‘pave the way’ for further releases of REACH-IT during Q1 2010 which will provide new industry functionalities, including the ‘Legal entity change’ module and C&L bulk notification submission module.

Because this software release involves a significant change in REACH-IT technical implementation, a full migration of the entire REACH-IT database is required and dossier submissions need to be suspended. Before being able to perform the migration, all previously submitted dossiers must have been fully processed (ie. undergone the business rule check, invoicing and technical completeness check). Therefore, dossier submission will be closed from 13:00 EET on Monday 14 December so that ECHA can ensure that all dossiers are fully processed in order to allow the migration to be carried out.

REACH-IT continues to be available until 18 December for companies to sign-up, search, view and retrieve information on pre-registrations and registrations and to claim the registration numbers for “new” substances they notified before 1 June 2008 under the previous legislation. Migration will start on 21 December, which requires a full closure of all REACH-IT functionalities.