The Dutch Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs in July released an extensive report with recommendations on the use of COI. For the reports, current practices in Austria, Poland and the UK have been examined along with the Netherlands'.

The UNHCR Representation in Japan developed a machine translation service for RSD stakeholders to use ecoi.net in the Japanese language.

An article in the International Journal of Refugee Law discusses standards regarding the use of COI in UK Upper Tribunal country guidance cases.

Sharon Rusu, former head of the IRB's Documentation Centre, was invited to speak at the joint EASO-ACCORD conference on COI methodology, but unfortunately had to cancel participation. With her kind permission, we're publishing the notes for the opening remarks she prepared. In them, Ms. Rusu gives insights into the early days of COI research and the development of quality standards.

ACCORD is happy to have welcomed representatives of the COI community at the joint EASO/ACCORD conference on COI methodology in Vienna. There were two occasions for this event: The 20th anniversary of ACCORD and the publication of the revised EASO COI Report Methodology.

EASO published a new COI report methodology, updating the 2012 version, as well as a style guide.

UNHCR and the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD), a department of the Austrian Red Cross, are partnering up for a streamlined content division between their protection information databases, Refworld and ecoi.net.

The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) published a practical guide on COI to assist judges and decision-makers in their use of COI. Additionally, EASO published an extensive judicial analysis produced by IARLJ-Europe on evidence and credibility assessment in the context of the Common European Asylum System. 

The Researcher is published two times a year by the Refugee Documentation Centre (RDC) in Ireland. It is a publication which combines academic papers, summaries of caselaw, guides to new legislation, reports of conferences, articles on RDC services and items of country of origin information.

The Austrian Federal Administrative Court and ACCORD organised a symposium in May 2018 to discuss the possibilities and limits of COI research.