The published collection
The published collection in the content collection of the Content Repository contains content in Published status. Publishing is a specific action that creates non-editable copies of authoring content for purposes such as localization or branching.
The published collection is organized by language. There is a language sub-collection for each language for which you have published content. These sub-collections are dynamically created when content is published to a given language.
Publishing is not available with DRM, so if you are using DRM, you will not have a Published collection in your system configuration.