Digest. XVIII      June - July 2018

Welcome to this edition of the InfoBlog! I hope you enjoy reading all the summer news which includes product news from Clarivate and IFI, RELX half year report and change of president at the European Patent Office.

Section I: Patent, scientific and legal information: content, search tools and analytics

Content

IFI Claims, who provide the content behind several well-known patent search tools, are now providing English machine translations (MT) of EP patents not published in English (full – text - of Abstract, Description and Claims). English MT for WO (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents are being processed too, these will including the Asian languages. Did you know that PCT (WO) applications may be published in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish?  IFI have also integrated the US FDA Orange book data. Orange book data provides names and other synonyms for approved drug products which improve search outcomes for pharmaceutical patents. Further new content from Korea and Brazil has also been added to the IFI Claims collection. IFI also announced expanded legal status data provision with US FDA Orange book exclusivity information, and Australian IPO patent register data now available.  Last year Clarivate introduced Publons – an award winning tool to help editors of academic peer review journals match papers with reviewers; this year Publons Reviewer Connect takes it a stage further powered by AI techniques and with access to Web of Science.

Search

Clarivate has been busy introducing new search tools to its databases, and combining products to provide more focussed intelligence for its customers. Derwent Innovation gets two new fields for patent owner - the ‘Optimized Assignee’ and the ‘Ultimate Parent fields’ help to identify the company who actually owns a patent and the parent company respectively.  Having this information readily available and in a directly usable format will speed up landscaping (reducing the need for ‘clean-up’) , and due diligence work. Clarivate published a white paper on its ‘smart search’ document retrieval technology. Here’s my summary – smart search is based around three principles 1) relevancy ranking, 2) cross-lingual search and 3) search (query) expansion. The underlying process uses the professionally written titles and abstracts in DWPI (Derwent World Patent Index) and is based upon a patented technology invented at Johns Hopkins University in the US.  Smart Search is available in Derwent Innovation. Last month LexisNexis launched Lexis Analytics, a product combining content and AI , made possible following the acquisitions of Lexis Advance, Lex Machina, Intelligize and Ravel Law.  ReedTech Life Sciences division launched ‘ReedTech Navigator for Drug Labels – the product contains information from 200,000 drug labels, which can be searched, and analysed for regulatory and other drug formulation information. WIPO has made available an early version of the 2019.01 IPC (International Patent Classification) for consultation.  Changes proposed include 681 new subdivisions (in English, and the same number in French), 307 modified groups in English and 629 in French, and 83 groups for deletion.   This will give 74,503 groups in the IPC for 2019.

Analytics

Clarivate Analytics published the annual JCR (Journal Citation Report) in a redesigned format which provides article level analysis, geographical information on authors and now includes Book Citation Index data. The report includes 11,655 journals from 80 countries, and contains information on 276 new journals Each Journal is given a Journal Impact Factor (JIF), which is used to compare journals. Clarivate reported that the editorial team of JCR are monitoring a number of journals where citation activity appears unusual. A report just published from Forrester evaluates eight text analytics platforms which are using AI approaches. The report judged the eight platforms using 22 criteria. Clarabridge, IBM, SAS, and Micro Focus scored most highly under this scheme. Google Big Query announced its pricing options and published explanations on its data storage and interrogation options which enable data stored in various formats and locations to be analysed together. IBM Watson announced it has integrated neural machine translation (NMT) processing into its Translator service. The following language pairs are available with the NMT technology: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Section II  IP matters

The IP5 Offices have started a new project to assess interest in ‘Collaborative Search & Examination’ possibilities under the PCT. Applicants can request to use the system. The Japan Patent Office revised its Examination Guidelines for Patent, Utility Models and Designs in June in light of recent changes to the Unfair Competition Act. The revisions essentially provide for a ‘grace period’ of up to 1 year for certain circumstances of disclosure of the invention.

IP Inter office meetings and agreements

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) and Korea IP Office (KIPO) are continuing work on the translation of ‘similar’ goods and services classification codes used for trademark examination purposes as part of the TM5 (Trademark Five Offices project).   The concordance list of 18,000 identifiers was published by JPO this month.

IP Individual office news

In July António Campinos took over as President of the European Patent Office (EPO) from Benoit Battistelli who had served in the role since 2010 . Prior to the appointment as President of the EPO, António Campinos served as Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in Alicante/Spain from 2010 until June 2018. He joined the Portuguese IP Office, INPI, in 2000 as Trademark Director and in 2005 was elected its President. He is supported by a management committee. The new President stressed his commitment to the Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court in his inaugural speech, underlining that 16 EU member states had already signed the agreement. The EPO published its quality report based on 2017 data.  The report highlighted the EPO’s robust approach to search quality with increased access to standards, technical reports and Asian patents highlighted as improvements on the content side. The Japan Patent Office published its design examination schedule for 2018 and a guide to licensing negotiations involving Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). SIPO (China) has established a new fast-track  IPR examination process at its centre in Shanghai to assist companies in high technology and biomedicine fields to obtain fast protection for their IPRs.   The Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) publishes each month an overview of new and revised standards relating to goods on sale in Japan.   In China SIPO announced that 751,000 patents of invention were filed as national CN patents and 23,000 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) (WO) international applications were made in the first half of 2018. The UKIPO published a guidance on IPRs and Brexit following the European Union (Withdrawal) Act which received Royal assent on 26 June 2018 and which is now law.

Section III: Company news

Anaqua announced that Pierre Fabre is using its IP Management software.  AWA  (formerly Awapatent) has acquired Dotkeeper to enable the combined company to provide focus for clients on trademarks, domain names and digital IP. The two companies have been partners since 2016. Clarivate Analytics will award the second Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis at the STI conference in Leiden in September. Linguamatics announced that US company Secure Exchange Solutions (SES) is deploying Linguamatics NLP technology in its ‘SES Spot’ medical review tool. SES Spot automates the analysis of health care records for insurance decision making. RELX (owner of LexisNexis, Elsevier and PatentSight) announced a simplification of its company structure effective from 8th September 2018. The single parent will be listed in London, Amsterdam and New York. Revenue grew by 4+% in first half of 2018. Teqmine Oy, a Finnish company founded in 2013, and specialising in IPR and Sci-Tech analysis, announced that it has been selected as a finalist in the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC) awards.