Digest IX- June 2017

This month the InfoBlog brings you updates on the information initiatives from the major patent offices, and from the many commercial vendors and their products in the information industry, in particular for scientific, technical and patent information. The InfoBlog now follows 60 organisations, large and small to bring you a synopsis of the latest news, and trends we observe. My highlights from June are the news items from Clarivate Analytics which indicate they are back in business, with the revival of the Derwent name for patent information products, and with the acquisition of a company providing software used by those engaged with academic publishing.   No news from Questel, and STN have announced STNext – which means STN classic users can benefit from enhanced functionality without subscribing to New STN of downloading software onto their desktop.     PatSEER Pro also plays to the browser based trend.   Enjoy this edition of the ‘blog, the next will be in September. Have a good Summer!

Patent information and patent office news.

The 10th meeting of the IP5 Offices (JPO, EPO, USPTO, SIPO, KIPO) took place this month in Malta.. In celebrating 10 years of cooperation, the IP5 also set forth their next steps for the creation of an international patent landscape that is; “efficient, cost-effective, and user friendly”. Against the backdrop of increasing numbers of patent filings, this includes working towards harmonization of practices and procedures, work-sharing between the offices, high-quality and timely search and examination results, and , most importantly for readers of this blog - ‘seamless access to patent information ’ . The IP5 offices are also aiming to improve their cooperation on the preparation of international search reports for international applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).  The PCT, administered by WIPO is not part of the IP5 group, but PCT applications are growing, and tend to be used by applicants wishing to file broadly – often a sign of important innovations.

News from the Asian offices.
The Japan Patent Office (JPO) has extended a pilot programme with Egypt for a further three years.   JPO works to assist and promote understanding of IP and its usage in developing economies, particularly in Asia and the Pacific Region. Through the JPO’s International Cooperation Division it provides access to the text of industrial property laws and regulations in English and Japanese from many countries, and this month regulations for Patents and Trademarks from Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Ireland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, USA were updated. Six proposals from SIPO were approved at the 37th session of the WIPO International Patent Classification (IPC) working group. The proposals, and others, will come into effect in the 2018 IPC edition. China became a member of the IPC Union in 1997, and since then SIPO has contributed to IPC revisions for the fields of bio-pesticides, electrical and food processing, reflecting the strength of its technological advances in these fields.

European office news.
The European Union Agreement to set up a Unified patent court which will handle European Union wide patents is slowly getting nearer as the UK and Estonia prepare to ratify the UPC Agreement, the German ratification however is held up over a constitutional matter.  The UPC Committee announced this month that the December 2017 commencement date cannot now be maintained. The DPMA (German Patent Office) celebrated its 140th anniversary. The DPMA last year handled over 130,000 patents, trademarks, utility models and designs, now has over 2,500 members of staff and an income of EU394 million, making it the largest national patent office in Europe. A history of the DPMA is also being created, with a new article published each month: https://presse.dpma.de/presseservice/englisch/unserservice/140years/index.html

Professional Search.
Each edition of the ‘blog reports on new products and product enhancements which help us to find the right document(s) and build collections for analysis; this is the focus of the blog.   The blog provides just brief details of products announced in June within each domain, with links so you can find out more about any item of interest.

Academic search and scientific information
Clarivate Analytics acquired Publons, for its platform allowing sharing, and discussions for those engaged in the peer review and editing of academic research for publication. This acquisition enhances Clarivate Analytics tools for academic researchers and publishers, which already include Web of Science, EndNote and ScholarOne.

Chemistry searching

Infochem, the German chemical information software specialists, announced a new release (version 3.0) of its computer aided synthesis design tool ICSYNTH.   New features are the implementation of a genuine reaction graph and a new 'Projects' section to allow for team working. ICSYNTH enables chemists to generate synthetic pathways for a target molecule.

Data Mining / Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
Averbis announced the release of the latest versions of ‘Information Discovery’ its text analytics platform (versions 4.9 to 4.11).   Information Discovery provides a platform for the collection and analysis of many types of documents from in house and third party sources, such as patents, academic literature, databases, websites. Documents can be integrated using tools for terminology, and annotation, and an evaluation tool. Texts can be compared for precision, recall, F1, and standard deviation.  Linguamatics Health enterprise NLP platform, which utilises I2E, is now in use at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and it has been developed to enable the University to make better use of its unstructured patient data, such as clinical notes.

Patent searching
Ambercite introduced Ambercite Ai, a new search tool intended as a complement to Ambercite’s ‘cluster searching’ (citations based) approach. Ambercite Ai provides three search choices : novelty, validity and licensing. Date limiters for priority and other dates, and display limiters on number of results, and family members of choice e.g. just US documents are also provided. Ranking is carried out based on Ambercite’s own algorithms.  Clarivate Analytics pays homage to its heritage -  Derwent Innovation is the new name for Thomson Innovation. This was announced at the US PIUG Annual meeting in May. ProQuest Dialog are selling and supporting the Gridlogics’ patent analytics platform . Gridlogics continue to enhance PatSeer and PatentINSIGHTPro, and this month announced several enhancements –namely a corporate tree and current owner field, legal status for US patents now gives a direct view to US PAIR, improved expiry date calculations, and a family level dead / alive status indicator. For pharmaceutical patents there is now Orange Book integration with deep linking to the FDA website. For improved search precision two new fields can be isolated from the full text . These are ‘summary / advantages of invention’ and ‘brief description of drawings’ available for 'US', 'EP', 'WO' and 'CN' when the format of the document permits, and for improved recall a new country is there for the searching – Portugal (PT) – applications and granted documents are available from 2007 until 2016, in Portuguese. STN also introduced a new search platform – STNext™.   STNext, available to all STN users, enhances the browser based version of STN classic.

IP services and IP legal company news.

Five AWAPatent consultants were recognized as being among the top trademark lawyers in their respective jurisdictions by the legal industry publication, ‘Who’s Who Legal’.   Another recognition for AWAPatent who were listed in ‘IAM Patent’ as “highly recommended” for patent prosecution and related activities in 2017. Two Danish companies, who are also AWA clients top the ‘Brand Finance’ listing – Pandora and Lego. Questel formed a partnership with Concur IP earlier this year, as it moves away from being a search and analytics software provider to a full service IP firm. Concur IP offer a patent drafting service for English language jurisdictions.

Events

There are a lot of meetings, conferences and events for those engaged in the business of patents and searching, and I have attended two events recently - PIUG Annual meeting in May in Atlanta, and my own CIIPM meeting in Cambridge UK.  In the interests of timely publication of the Blog, I’ll report briefly on those next time! A full report on the PIUG Annual meeting will be published in World Patent Information. And a review of CIIPM will shortly be available through Cambridge Network.