Submitting a draft for publication

This article is part of the publishing journey for statistics.gov.scot. You can find the full journey in Publishing open data on statistics.gov.scot.


Once you have uploaded your dataset and completed all the necessary metadata and information for your dataset, you will need to submit it to the Open Data team to review. To do this you will need to click the blue “Submit Draft” button at the top of the page.

You can make the draft available to all users of a specific type by selecting ‘Role. ’Selecting ‘managers’ as the role type will send the draft to the statistics.gov.scot team. If your draft contains pre-release data, you should use statistics.opendata@gov.scot.

Alternatively, you can send a draft to a single named user by selecting the ‘User’ option and finding the name of the user you wish to send your draft to. You can submit the draft to another named account: for example, to a member of the statistics.gov.scot team or a member of your own team for checking. This allows you to maintain the confidentiality of any pre-release statistics in drafts before publication.

NB: as an editor you will not see the option to "Publish" in the banner.

All data owners will be provided with Editor level access: this will allow you to make changes to any section of the site, but these will need to be approved by a Publisher or Manager in the statistics.gov.scot team before going live. We recommend that all drafts are sent to the statistics.opendata@gov.scot account.

The Open Data team do not get an automatic notification every time a draft is submitted. When you submit a draft for approval, please drop us an email to statistics.opendata@gov.scot with the following information:

  • Name of the draft – please call it something meaningful
  • Who you submitted it to – this should ordinarily be statistics.opendata@gov.scot
  • type of update:
    • New dataset – dataset never published before
    • Dataset update – new data added to existing dataset
    • Dataset correction – e.g., correcting previous data or adding new categories
    • Metadata update
  • Frequency of update
  • Whether it contains pre-release data
  • Link to publication
  • Is it Official Statistics?
  • Publication date for the publication itself
  • When you would like us to ideally publish the draft
  • Next update due: Month-Year

This information is required for all drafts submitted to the open data platform. We will not be able to process your draft without this information, so please ensure that you submit this to the team when notifying us about submission of a draft.

Please also indicate if there has been any format change compared to the previous dataset update. If we are not notified about these changes, we will assume they are errors. This will lead to delays in the processing of your draft.

Related Articles