Extract Information Industry Blog

InfoBlog - Mar-Apr 2019

Thu, 30 May 2019 20:33:24 GMT

Welcome to the second edition of the InfoBlog for 2019 covering ‘information industry’ news published in press releases, on company websites, and in blogs, during March and April and found using a deepSEARCH9 newstracker. The newstracker follows 72 organisations. Read on to discover what each organisation has published from patent information industry news, life sciences information, to company and IP office news. Highlights this time include the acquisition of Linguamatics by IQVIA, the growth of combined search / IP management software – see Trademark.com from Clarivate. This month we reintroduce the section on upcoming IP and commercial information related conferences, trainings and events. Extract Information also maintains a listing of events from around the world relevant to information and IP https://www.extractinfo.info/events . On with the news……

Section I: Commercial information: apps, databases, UI, patent, scientific, life sciences, technical, standards and legal information, translation tools, content .

Patents

DWPI now contains patent publications from eight former Soviet republics, now known as the CIS(Commonwealth of Independent States ), and the Eurasian Patent Organization (EAPO). The specific patent authorities now available are: Armenia (AM), Belarus (BY), Eurasian Patent Organization (EA), Georgia (GE), Kazakhstan (KZ), Kyrgyzstan (KG), Moldova (MD), Uzbekistan (UZ), and Tajikistan (TJ). IFI Claims has made a static patent data set available for research purposes in conjunction with World Patent Information (WPI Journal). The data is hosted on Zenodo, the CERN Open Science platform. We are hopeful that by making this collection available we can stimulate research once again specific to patent information retrieval, and patent informatics, which have their own nuances, and communities with specific requirements. Link to the collection: https://zenodo.org/record/1489994#.XO5BbKR7ljU STN announced new generic legal status codes are available for US patents within the EPO’s INPADOC database. The ten new generic codes group together over 80 detailed codes, these should making comparisons across authorities more feasible, and should provide an easier to understand overview of the patent’s status. Look out for more databases introducing the new legal status codes following work by the patent offices and PDG to find commonalities

Standards, and Regulatory information

ReedTech has launched ‘ SingleSource TM’ , an online publication platform for Medical Devices regulatory and commercial product information. Techstreet and IPC have partnered to allow IPC members (disambiguation note: IPC here stands for ‘Institute for Printed Circuits’) access to its electronics manufacturing standards through Techstreet enterprise . Techstreet provides a searchable collection of standards and standards in development from over 150 different standards publishers. IPC produces standards relating to printed circuit board manufacture and electronics assembly. IPC makes available around 300 active standards.

Life Sciences, R&D

Scilligence has partnered with Elsevier and is preparing to integrate Reaxys into its Electronic Notebooks platform (ELN) . This will allow scientists to record their experiments, and link it to published information. The initiative uses the UDM (Unified Data Model) maintained by the Pistoia Alliance.

Search and Discovery

Ambercite has published an example workflow process showing how to work a search on Ambercite for similar patents into a broader strategy using more than one patent search database. Linguamatics regularly improve I2E – with new releases. The latest release one new functions brings the ability to search for e.g. any phase of clinical trials by leaving the ‘Phase’ field blank. Searching on STN, the patent and scientific database aggregator, is now more effective – the number of answers you can cumulate as you create a search strategy has increased to 100 million per file (database). Chemical structure search limits have also been increased, and since April Clarivate’s DWPI on STN is updated twice a week . Searching for trademark images has always relied on using words and classifications to find marks, and then looking through lots of returned trademark records, many with little relevance. That could all soon change thanks to Artificial Intelligence. WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) has launched a new AI-powered image search tool within the Global Brand database , for reviewing novelty of trademark images. At launch on April 1st the new search technology covered 45 national trademark offices and 38 million trademarks.

Analytics and Forecasting

IGI , the IP search provider of the Swiss patent office, has published ten search definitions which can be used to build patent data sets in new technology areas. The definitions use patent classifications and keyword combinations, examples include Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, and Protein engineering. The definitions can be used on PatentSight as filters. This is a great initiative, and could enable bench marking of search and analyses on different patent databases.

Document delivery

Patent information analysts are used to being able to obtain the full text electronic or PDF version of patent documents with the click of a button. Obtaining the full text of scientific literature is often more challenging, due to copyright and subscription restrictions. Now EBSCO has partnered with Reprints Desk Inc., so that its customers can use the ‘ Article Galaxy Scholar Collection’ to link to PDFs of articles outside of their in house journal subscriptions. This service is available for academic and government customers of EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS). EBSCO will be integrating StackMap into their Ebsco Discovery Service product for libraries. StackMap is a tool to help users locate books, and other material within a library. StackMap was formed in 2008 to provide indoor collection mapping.

Section II IP Management, and IP services

Trademarks must be monitored to ensure timely opposition to any similar marks. Clarivate have launched a trademark registration and watching service, trademark.com aimed at small US based companies. Minesoft introduced IPShare – a secure, project based tool for analysis of patents, and other documents for team-decision making.

IP Offices,

The EPO and Jordan entered into talks regarding validation of European Patents in Jordan . EP patents can already be validated in Cambodia, the Republic of Moldova, Morocco and Tunisia. Switzerland IP Office decreased annual fees for patents and also for SPCs (Supplementary Protection Certificates). Blog readers may be interested to also sign up for WIPO’s technology trends series of reports . The reports analyse patent documents and scientific publications on AI related technologies

Section III: Company news, M&A, People news

Elsevier , one of the largest academic publishers is under pressure to reduce subscription charges and to publish more Open Access articles. Researchers whose work is financed by governmental organisations are also encouraged to publish their work as Open Access. Elsevier is trialling a new style arrangement with Norwegian universities, giving access to all Elsevier’s journal titles, and allowing Universities in Norway to publish their work as Open Access. Similar negotiations are ongoing between German Universities and Elsevier. Linguamatics is now owned (since January 2019) by IQVIA . IQVIA is a health sciences company, formed through the merger of IMS Health and Quintiles in 2017. IQVIA designs and runs clinical trials, provides commercial forecasting, and carries out risk trends analysis for its customers. Linguamatics brings I2E NLP search software, ontologies, and technologies to IQVIA’s data repositories and clinical trials business.

People

At Clarivate Analytics PLC Jerre Stead takes on the role of CEO, he is already Executive Chairman. Marian Roberge joins ProQuest as Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources. Marian was previously at Plastipak.

Section IV: Training Conferences, and Events

QPIP , over 10 years in gestation, the Certificate for Patent Information Professionals (ISBQPIP) finally arrived in March as the first candidates (over 200 applied) were registered through a Prior Experience Recognition scheme. Patent search and analysis examinations are planned for 2020.

Past events:

Linguamatics held its Spring Text Mining Conference, in March in Cambridge, UK, the conference brings together NLP I2E enthusiasts to share use cases and expertise in setting up queries. Linguamatics customers typically use I2E for the analysis of unstructured data in health informatics, for adverse reactions identification, and for mining patient data, as well as for biomarker identification for research purposes. Partners IFI Claims, who provide patent data and ChemAxon, who provide chemical structure search, also attended.

Upcoming events:

The 41st PATINFO takes place in June in Ilmenau, Germany. This year’s meeting is not alone in having AI in the title: “IP and AI – Wish or Reality”. https://www.paton.tu-ilmenau.de/en/the-paton/patinfo.html Also with an AI focus, this time on ownership of the IP, ‘AI: decoding IP’ takes place in London and is co-organised by UK IPO and WIPO. https://orcula.com/ipo/

The 4th Cambridge Information and IP Meeting (CIIPM) takes place on 3rd July 2019. This year’s theme is ‘IP and Information Ecosystems’ with speakers from the UK IPO, SciBite, Shell and Inngot and workshops from Minesoft, Gridlogics, PatentSight and PatSnap. The CIIPM event is co-organised by Extract Information and PSIM. We hope to see some of you at the meeting!. https://www.ciipm.co.uk/4th-ciipm-annual-meeting-2019 .

InfoBlog Jan-Feb 2019

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 19:06:13 GMT

Welcome to the first edition of the InfoBlog in 2019 covering news published online in January and February as picked up by the deepSEARCH9 newstracker! If 2018 finished with acquisitions, 2019 has started with even more, with InfoChem and Clarivate Analytics changing ownership, EBSCO acquiring HealthDecision, and Questel acquiring Concur IP. These acquisitions underline the importance of information as an asset as companies build compelling health informatics and IP services tools for decision makers. There’s lots more happening. Read on to discover patent information industry news, life sciences information, and associated company and IP office news.

Section I: Patent databases, scientific, life sciences and legal information news

Platform
Clarivate launched the Cortellis Cloud , built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) , to provide customers with smoother access to Cortellis data and enabling them to more easily link their own data to the Cortellis content. Cortellis provides data collected throughout the drug pipeline from discovery, through clinical trials to regulatory submissions. DeepSearch9 has introduced a new set of APIs allowing company information to be linked to 135 million registered companies. The information can also be mapped to a geographic location.

Content .
Aistemos has added patent litigation data from China, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, and UK to its Cipher database . The data is supplied by MaxVal and complements the US patent litigation data already on Cipher. IFI Claims announced a new data source for its Chinese patents, which will be used for new publications in the first instance; the backfile will be replaced later in 2019. IFI Claims have also announced plans to use Google Translate to produce its machine-translated-into-English patent document collection.

Search
Life Sciences
Each year the two major biomedical databases Embase and Medline / PubMed update their thesauri and introduce new terms to classify new fields, and facilitate retrieval. STN has implemented these new 2019 codes in Embase , with 128 new drug terms added to Emtree and Medline’s MeSH thesaurus was also updated with 360 new headings, most of these were for pharmaceutical compounds. Full details are available on the NLM website for MeSH , where there is also an ‘on-demand’ look up of MeSH terms from a text entry. STN has introduced a new search field called Key Terms.

Patent information
Aptean GenomeQuest has integrated the CAS Biosequences module into its sequence database so both can be searched together. Clarivate updated the DWPI manual codes for 2019. These enable focussed searches to be performed and include 28 new CPI (Chemical Patents Index) codes and 9 new GMPI/EPI codes (ies General and Mechanical Patents Index and Electrical Engineering Patents Index). The new codes typically represent emerging technologies. For example, this year codes for Biocatalysts, and FinTech were added and renewable energy related codes were extended e.g. for Manufacture, and maintenance of solar power systems. Full manual code look up is available on the Clarivate website. DWPI is available through STN and Questel as well as directly. The DWPI database was started in 1963 by Monty Hyams, DWPI is one of the oldest patent family databases. STN enhanced the France and GB full text patent databases adding to enhance search adding new ‘Key Terms’, Numeric Property functionality and combination sets for CPC. GB D0 filings have also been added for completeness. Key Terms have been created using a combined linguistic and statistical approach to index the patent document for search and results evaluation. Key Terms are available in the full text databases for authorities: AU, CA, FR, GB, IN, JP, and WO (PCT). PatentGATE published some interesting statistics of the availability of CPC classifications on JP, CN, and KR patent documents. PatSeer introduced ReleSense, a NLP text processing engine that has been trained using patent terminologies, scientific literature, and clinical trials reports. Gridlogics will utilise it for search and categorisation activities to enhance relevance of results.

User Interface

Reviewing large results sets from the legal status viewpoint has long been a challenge. STN have introduced new display format IFAM2 in its INPADOC and INPAFAM databases which presents the legal event and bibliographic only.

Analytics and Forecasting

Clarivate Analytics released Cortellis Analytics – Drug Timeline and Success Rates (DTSR) in for forecasting in the drug pipeline, enabling continuous and dramatic improvements in pipeline forecasting and R&D investment decisions

Section II IP Management, IP Offices, and IP services

Anaqua recently launched AQX, an IP asset management platform which can be used by both corporations and legal professionals to track innovation and evaluate their IP portfolios. AQX contains financial, and IP portfolio management modules. Anaqua was founded in 2004 to provide IP management software. Anaqua has acquired 5 companies since 2015 including Acclaim IP for its patent search technology which it acquired in 2016.

IP Office news
On 14th January at the DPMA a new trade mark law came into force, introducing the certification mark, and strengthening the rights of trademark owners. The DPMA will introduce certificates which contain a QR code linking through to the electronic Trade Mark Register. The JPO has published some case examples in AI related technologies to highlight the approach which may be taken during examination. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has appointed Thomas Krause as the new Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property Law and Solicitor of the USPTO, and Henry “Jamie” Holcombe as the USPTO’s Chief Information Officer..

Section III: Company news, M&A, People news

Anaqua has received significant equity investment from the European private equity firm, Astorg. Astorg will become the controlling shareholder of Anaqua. The Brazilian IP Office, (INPI), is implementing AI search technology developed at CAS to assist its examiners with evaluation of new patent applications. The CAS technology uses semantic, similarity and other machine learning techniques to inform prior art search.

Clarivate Analytics has merged with Churchill Capital Corp and prepares to list on the NYSE as Clarivate . Clarivate launched its ‘ Life Science Alliances Program ’ which enables specialist health informatics data developers to make their data available as part of the Cortellis Cloud. The first companies to collaborate in the program are Bioinfogate , Vitrana and Waters Corporation. EBSCO acquired HealthDecision, a leading provider of evidence-based clinical information tools to clinicians and patients at the point of care. HealthDecision software is used in clinical practice, as a conversation enabler between physician and patient, it presents medical data, guidelines, and personalised risk analysis. HealthDecision was founded in 2004 by cardiologist Jon Keevil to provide medical information to assist patients in their decision to begin taking statins to lower cholesterol level. Elsevier announced Kumsal Bayazit is its new Chief Executive Officer . Kumsal has worked at Elsevier since 2004, in Legal, Business and Risk analysis roles, and was most recently responsible for Reed Exhibitions EMEA region. InfoChem GmbH , a cheminformatics company which was founded in 1989 and based in Munich was acquired by DeepMatter Group PLC , for EU2m. Questel acquired Concur IP to complement the MultiLing business which it acquired in 2018. Concur IP provides patent drafting expertise and has expertise in handling licensing and royalties relating to SEPs (Standard Essential Patents).

Digest XX - Nov-Dec 2018

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 21:20:24 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of the InfoBlog! I hope you enjoy reading about all the patent, IP, science, and technical information company and system insights in this edition. Highlights include the acquisition by Dennemeyer of Octimine Technologies in October 2018. Companies providing IP services continue to consolidate to provide the full suite of IP management tools and bringing patent search and analysis software for their customers. Reformatting of its biomedical databases for data sciences brings Elsevier towards the pharma/ biotech R&D scientists directly. Read more in this edition of the information industry news which includes stories I found interesting published in November and December 2018. The blog follows the usual format starting with content, search, analysis industry tools, and finishing with company news. The first 2019 edition will follow very shortly.

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

Content

EBSCO a multi-database host, recently acquired the Linguistics Abstracts Online database from Wiley. Linguistics Abstract Online is a bibliographic database providing indexing and abstracts from 800 linguistics and language study journals from 1911 onwards.

Search
Entellect, a new platform announced by Elsevier, presents the biomedical databases Embase, Reaxys and Pharmapendium and their ontologies in a single environment where additional content, such as electronic lab note books can be added. Entellect is for data scientists in the biotech industry. Minesoft enhanced its PatBase Analytics V2 platform with a new patent citation analysis module. Users can create visualisations that show an overview of citations by company, year and filing location, it is also possible to drill down to the actual citations for deeper analysis. The precision of MARPAT® answer sets just improved on STN, the MARPAT search algorithm is also being improved and comprehensiveness is retained effective on all three versions - STNext®, STN Express® and STN® on the WebSM . MARPAT is the CAS database of Markush structures.

User Interface

Ambercite Ai release 4.2 introduced a ‘share results’ button to enable faster review of results by a team. The interactive tool has filters. PatSeer also introduced a faster results-reviewer with the ‘Standard+Kwic Results View’.

Academic Publishing Process

Elsevier, as part of its open science initiative has acquired Science-Metrix Inc ., a research evaluation company that provides research evaluation and analytics to assess science and technology activities. At the same time it also acquired 1science. 1science was founded in 2015 to provide direct access to peer reviewed scientific articles it now has three products 1foldr, and 1figr, along the original 1findr. 1findr contains 90 million records of which 27 million are open access articles. Springer Nature and Publons , announced a partnership in December. As part of the initiative the Publons’ Reviewer Recognition Service will be used by 2,000 Springer Nature journals, starting with Scientific Reports an open access journal. Springer Nature and Publons also plan to collaborate to make it easier for editors to find an appropriate expert to conduct peer reviews. Publons was founded in 2013 and is now owned by Clarivate Analytics.

Section II: IP management

IdeaPoint launched version 5.0 of its innovation management software introducing ‘ Mobile Scout’ for managing technology scouting data and innovation capture around business partnerships and research collaborations. IdeaPoint is owned by Anaqua. Anaqua has acquired five companies since 2015 including ideaPoint, AcclaimIP, and Lecorpio. LexisNexis introduced a mobile app - PCLaw Go . PCLaw Go enables users to track and enter time associated with cases and matters directly to PCLaw through the mobile app. The new software automates data entry and thus brings more accurate and faster billing, and accounting. Minesoft launched PatDocs – a new IP legal automation tool which facilitates family tree mapping, filing US prosecution requirements such as IDS. Information can be shared with others allowing legal IP professionals to work with industry clients.

IPO office news

The EPO remembered the publication of the first EP patent application in December 40 years ago.- EP0000001 was filed by the European Atomic Energy Community for a thermal heat pump. Looking forward, the EPO held a conference on Blockchain technology, exploring patenting activity, and potential of blockchain for the IP industry itself. A report ‘Patenting Blockchain’ is available The IPI (Swiss patent office) has been providing patent and trade mark searches for over thirty years. Since 2003 under the name of ip-search . Over 50 specialists work at ip-search and over the years have provided at least 10,000 searches for their industry customers. The JPO (Japan Patent Office) carried out the semi-annual update of its FI classification scheme . The classification is revised twice a year in April and November. WIPO added six national patent collections to its Patentscope database in 2018 .

Section III: Company news, M&A, People news

Dennemeyer Group announced the acquisition of Octimine Technologies GmbH . Octimine was founded in 2015 by researchers from the Max Planck Institute and LMU Munich who created an artificial intelligence (AI) style (AI basis - semantic text analytics and machine learning methods) engine for patent search and analysis. Linguamatics is now an official Amazon Web Services (AWS) Technology Partner . Linguamatics already utilizes AWS to provide access to I2E OnDemand, iScite, and for clients to host their own private data clouds.

Digest. XIX August - October 2018

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 06:48:28 GMT

Welcome to this edition of the InfoBlog! I hope you enjoy catching up with all the patent, IP, science, and technical information news. I’m writing this just before heading off to the EPO patent information conference where I am looking forward to meeting new entrants and finding out about all the new product developments for patent search, which I will report on next time. Highlights in this edition are the acquisition of MultiLing by Questel, and we await news of the new espacenet at the EPO PIC conference and the address by Antonio Campos the new president of the EPO. This edition of the information industry news covers items published from August to October 2018.

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

Content
Minesoft’s Patbase and Patbase Express have added full text patent documents from Estonia, Iceland, Turkey, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Italy, Cyprus. - bringing the full text collection to 60 authorities. PatSeer reached 53 full text authorities in October, and added litigation case information from Darts IP. Patbase have also linked up with Darts IP to provide access to their patent litigation information. Patbase customers will gain enhanced legal status information to inform validity, and competitor intelligence decision making.

Search
DWPIM is now available on STNext as a structure-based database with over 2.1 million Markush structures. The structures are selected from 890,000 Derwent World Patents Index® documents. DWPIM chemical patent data which comes from 33 patenting authorities and is updated 82 times a year with structures of organic, organometallic, inorganic compounds, polymers and plastics, and partially defined structures. Competitive intelligence is important no matter what industry you are active in, and Northern Light has used Google’s Open Source TensorFlow Machine Learning technology, which was released in 2016, to create SinglePoint for its clients who need to assess large volumes of full text market research information. Full article is in Online Searcher 31/08/2018, Competitive Intelligence Portals for the 21st Century, By Keiser, Barbie E. The JPO has published the FI term revision information, which will be reflected in databases in due course, and on the J-Plat Pat search engine.

User Interface PatSeer is now available with a German language interface, and has added an export format for Vantage PointOrganising results is just as important as finding them and BizInt Smart Charts have created a new display format for chemical structures . The new format takes a structure based approach. It was announced at the ACS meeting in August 2018. Linguamatics improved their hit-term highlighting in Excel by keeping colours consistent across columns.

Analytics
PatSeer 360 – a new product from Gridlogics was launched in October. PatSeer 360 integrates scoring models with over 40 parameters, and taxonomies to enable users to identify technology trends in their patent data. PatSeer 360 combines business and legal data into a dashboard approach. Another new tool from Gridlogics – VizMAP is available for semantic analysis of large patent data sets.

Section II IP matters

IP Inter office meetings and agreements

Japan Patent Office (JPO) and India Patent Office agreed to start a bilateral ‘PPH’ pilot programme during 2019. They will also cooperate in IT and IP awareness, and conducted discussions on making the India Traditional Knowledge Digital Library part of PCT minimum documentation. The JPO – and KIPO are cooperating to publish a Concordance List of similar Trademark group codes , around 46,000 goods and services are included on the list.

IP Individual office news

The US PTAB ( Patent Trial and Appeal Board) publishes regular information and statistics on Trials and Appeals held. AWA noted that Apple filed the highest number of petitions in the first 6 months of 2018, with Samsun and LG in second place.

Section III: Company news, M&A, People news

In September Klaus Kater , MD of deepSEARCH9 – which is the engine behind this Blog – gave an acclaimed talk at Semantics 2018 in Vienna. Klaus explained how machine learning can combine with data gathering to create a classification tool for CI (competitive intelligence) purposes. PatentGate turned 10 and to celebrate published information on developing products and services for legal status, analytics and patent watching. ProQuest’s Ex Libris acquired *Research Ltd . * Research Ltd was founded in 1994 to provide information on funding opportunities. It’s customers are in the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Europe. Questel acquired MultiLing – adding patent translations to its portfolio of IP management and IP search capabilities.

Timothy Neely, recently from KPMG, was appointed MD in Japan for Clarivate Analytics . Clarivate Analytics awarded to Dr. Orion Penner the 2018 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis. This award was launched in 2017 to recognise innovations in the field. Dr. Orion Penner has proposed a method, based on forward and backward citation networks of assessing whether a publication represents a ’pivot’ from old to new ideas.

Digest. XVIII June - July 2018

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:08:54 GMT

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.

Digest XVII April - May 2018

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 07:26:50 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of the InfoBlog! The Infoblog reports on news and events from across the information industry during April and May 2018. This edition includes news of two very interesting acquisitions – one in patent analytics and the other for full text scientific journal article access. The remaining news is split into three sections:

Data: content, search, analysis
IP Legal matters
IPO Office news

Top story: Clarivate and Reed Tech strengthen their offerings by acquisitions

The big news in the corporate patent information world in May was the acquisition of PatentSight GmbH by Reed Tech ®. This acquisition provides Reed Tech with a strong and well respected European patent analytics platform to complement its patent search product TotalPatent. PatentSight was founded ten years ago by Nils Omland and will now form part of the Lexis Nexis IP division of Reed Tech. Clarivate Analytics have also been busy updating their search and analysis technology portfolio with the acquisition of Kopernio in April. Kopernio makes use of AI to provide simple, straightforward, legal access to complete scientific articles which are suggested from a search of scientific peer reviewed literature.

Section I: Data: content, search, analysis

Patent Data
Lighthouse IP launched its global bibliographic and legal status information data product – Diamond File. Diamond File has information from almost 150 countries worldwide, and Lighthouse plans to keep the data regularly updated. Lighthouse also announced its full text patent data collection now contains seventy four countries.

Patent Information Analysis
Good news for chemistry searchers of patents and NPL (non-patent literature): the Component Class Identifiers (/CCI) field in CAS REGISTRY on STN is now searchable. This is important for those searching multi-component substances. The search results will include hits based on individual components as well as on the overall substance (/CI field). In CAS REGISTRY, the /CI search code (codes or terms as a bound phrase) will find substances such as: alloys, mixtures, minerals, and ring parents.

Trademarks information

CompuMark and White Rabbit (or Bai Tu) announced a strategic partnership which will enable CompuMark access to enhanced Chinese trademark information, and Bai Tu ‘s customers can take advantage of CompuMark’s services. CompuMark is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clarivate Analytics.

Life Sciences databases and search technologies
Linguamatics launched iScite – an AI powered scientific search engine which is intuitive to use but still enables anyone to use the full NLP capabilities to enact very precise biomedical searches. Linguamatics have filed for a patent for their ‘Answer Routing Engine’. iScite was awarded Best in Show Award at BIO-IT World in May.
STN updated the Emtree® thesaurus for the second time this year. The thesaurus now contains 81,003 preferred terms (1,019 added since January) and more than 355,000 synonyms. 189 are new drug terms allowing you to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the terminology of pharmacology and biomedicine. For medical device searching there are 3,673 medical device trade names making it easier to find information on new products, adverse events, product – drug combinations, and post-launch-drug clinical trials information.

Dissertations
Open dissertations ( www.opendissertations.org ), a project between EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and BiblioLabs, went live in April. The service provides one stop access to freely available, searchable(?) dissertations from over 30 institutions, including some in the UK.

Full dissertations in the IP field are published, in English, by JPO on their website. The table entitled ‘Thesis Titles of Long-Term Researchers’ contains studies with a joint Japan and emerging economy focus. Technologically everything from medicinal plants to software patents are investigated.

Section II: IP legal matters

China established four specialist IP Tribunals in 2017 in Nanjing, Suzhou, Chengdu and Wuhan, are attached to the intermediate courts in these mid-tier cities. The local courts hear civil cases relating to IP for their entire provinces. Whereas the three specialist courts which were established in 2014 in the largest Chinese cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou only hear cases from within the city. Some statistics on quantity and values of cases settled was presented. It appears that damages awarded have risen for intentional infringement cases.

Patent disputes in the US
The Supreme court in the US has confirmed support for the PTAB (Patent Trial and Appeal Board to make decisions on Intellectual Property Rights. The PTAB has so far heard 7,000 petitions and has cancelled 1,300 patents as a result. Interestingly the pharmaceutical industry prefers that cases are heard in courts, but the high technology industry companies, who are more concerned about patent trolls, prefer that disputes can be heard by the PTAB. The USPTO are considering whether inventions created by

Section III: IPO Office News

Inter office meetings and agreements
WIPO and KIPO: KIPO has started using WIPO translate for its patent filing and examination processes. WIPO Translate uses neural MT technology to translate patent documents in one of the PCT official languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) into English and vice-versa.

Individual office news

In April (18th April to be precise) Japan celebrated ‘ Invention Day’ . Why 18th April? Because on that day in 1885 the Patent Monopoly Act was passed. This was the predecessor of the current Patent Law in Japan. Also in April: the JPO published its latest statistics on patent, utility model, design, and trademark filings, and the latest FI revisions. The JPO publishes FI revisions in November and April each year and they are worth checking as indicators of emerging technologies in Japan. It is often important to use old and new codes for full retrieval whilst codes are updated.

On 26th April the UK ratified the Unified Patent Court agreement. This agreement will become part of the Brexit negotiations as the UK prepared to leave the EU in 2019.

Section IV: Company news, New technologies, People

In May Anaqua predicted the date, technology, market application, and type of assignee and inventor for the 10 millionth US patent which is likely to be published in June. Read the June InfoBlog to find out if they were right! Clarivate Analytics publishes an annual measure of the ‘ innovativeness’ of Europe’s Universities. Research for the ranking is carried out using Clarivate’s own Web of Science and Derwent Innovation products. This year the publication indicates the top three spots remain unchanged with KU Leuven (Belgium) still the most innovative University in Europe. Imperial College, and University of Cambridge were again ranked second and third respectively.

Iconic Machine Translations , based in Dublin, won a KTI Impact Licence2Market award recently for their Ensemble Architecture for Neural Machine Translation. (nMT) which is used to translate in house electronically stored documents from in over 50 languages.

Looking for novelty
The Nordic Patent and Registration Office is using Teqmine , a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) patent analysis tool to evaluate patent applications for patentability. Teqmine Analytics Oy was founded in 2013. Teqmine was trained using patent documents. Uppdragshuset introduced AutoMatch – a technology aimed at innovation management. Automatch compares your company’s innovations with existing concepts to provide a quick overview of what is likely to be novel.

People
Gail Morrison is now VP Customer Experience, a new position at Clarivate Analytics, she is based in Philadelphia, USA.

Digest XVI - March 2018

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 20:11:31 GMT

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of the InfoBlog! I hope you enjoy reading this month’s news which includes product news from Minesoft, ProQuest and the JPO’s J-PlatPat database. Some IP offices , EPO, JPO and WIPO, have published the latest IP statistics. Regular readers will know the Blog follows around 60 organisations involved with information and IP, including the IP offices and commercial hosts and free patent information databases. We bring you an overview of the latest new products, content, tools and directions from the patent offices with links so you can go back to the original source to find out more. The raw material for the blog is identified using ds9 web tracking software. In April if you are going to be at the IC-SDV conference in Nice, do take the opportunity to find out more - Extract Information and deepSearch 9 will both be there.

Section I: Patent data: content and search

Patent content and search

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) published an authority file of document publication numbers available digitally from 1993 to December 2017. The JPO has also released enhancements to its J-PlatPat database . The new search functions added are 1): the possibility to join patent classifications and key words in the same search, 2) Proximity search operators 3) Text search in English of international patent gazettes, 4) more content e.g., domestic publications of patent applications, and 5) a greater number of search results can be handled. Minesoft’s ‘ Citation Explorer’ module now allows the tracking of citations at the family level as well as for an individual document. Citations can be tracked backwards and forwards. The Citation Tree viewer has also been enhanced to show backwards and forwards citations. Citation Explorer is a global patent citation database with coverage of EPO, US, CN, JP and KR citations and which now includes NPL citation data. Data can also now be exported for further analysis. Software for Intellectual Property GmbH announced the results view for Invention Navigator has been improved allowing display of the results in an image view for rapid evaluation.

Patent Information Analysis

CAS published an interesting study on the IP focus of several countries, based on analysis of their own content. It’s a nice infographic but some more background to the data used to create the images and draw the conclusions would be appreciated. LexisNexis introduced PatentAdvisor ETA its software which takes a look at US patent examiner performance to enable applicants to work more efficiently with the USPTO.

Section II: Life Sciences content

Conferences database

ProQuest Dialog has loaded the Northern Light Life Sciences Conferences Abstract collection, which contains over 2 million abstracts and posters from 3,800 life sciences conferences. Coverage dates from 2010. The database is updated daily and content is available within three weeks of appearing on conference websites. Patent searchers will know that conference papers can often be the first time a new compound or invention is mentioned in public – - often once the patent is filed, but before it is publish, so these publications are a great source of competitive intelligence.

Section III: IPO Office News

Inter office meetings and agreements

An EPO validation agreement with Cambodia entered into force in March. This stretches the boundaries of Europe into Asia, permitting applicants whose patents have been granted at the EPO to gain protection in Cambodia! KIPO has been working with UAE (United Arab Emirates) to bring a fully automated industrial property system into operation at the UAE IP office . The JPO and WIPO hosted a meeting to celebrate 30 years of the ‘ Japan Funds-in Trust’ . 54 countries participated.

Individual office news

The DPMA (German Patent Office) held a user forum this month. 150 people attended the day to learn about DPMA developments such as the digital service DPMAdirektPro, and to review trends in patent filings in Germany where unsurprisingly inventions related to autonomous vehicles were on the increase in 2017. The EPO published its annual statistics reporting on numbers of filings, applications, grants, and its ‘production’ in the form of searches, examinations, and oppositions delivered. In 2017 3.7 % of all EP patents granted were opposed, and of these 73% were upheld or amended. Paving the way for new uses of patent information, potentially for integration with other data, the EPO published its data as Linked Open Data . The data set uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to identify patent applications, publications and other data points, the data can be accessed via API or downloaded in bulk. The EPO published a call for proposals under its academic research programme . Closing date is 30th April. The JPO announced new examination guidelines for computer software related inventions will come into effect from April 1st. The JPO also published the 2017 trial decisions (appeals against the examiner’s decision of refusal), translated into English. The USPTO has revealed a new design for the cover for issued patents, to begin with patent 10 million, which it is expected to issue during 2018.

Section III: Company news, Conferences and Events

Caroline Birkle has been appointed as the General Manager of Clarivate Analytics research information management division, Converis . Converis software is used by librarians to understand usage of collections including Web of Science, Derwent Innovation Index, and InCites. In 2016 IBM Watson built in the option for its customers to customize their own classification schemes for their own image libraries. And this has improved image retrieval for the customers in the auto industry. Example case studies given were Belron – who use Watson to improve in house communication of automotive glass repair requirements and Volkswagen who are creating a new generation of car manuals for its own customers. Linguamatics are hosting their Spring Text Mining Conference from April 23rd to 25th in Cambridge, UK. There will be talks from AbbVie, Bayer, Merck KgaA, Mundipharma, and Novo Nordisk as well as training and updates on I2E. Ethan Eisner became President of Reed Tech in March, taking over from Sam Hardman who has retired.

Digest XV - January - February 2018

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 08:33:30 GMT

The 2018 monthly editions of the Blog are a little late publishing, because as you can see we have been busy behind the scenes creating a new website for Extract Information! I hope you agree the layout for the Blog is much improved. A reminder that the Blog follows around 60 organisations involved with information and IP, including the offices and commercial and free patent information databases. We bring you an overview of the latest new products, content, tools and directions from the patent offices with links so you can go back to the original source to find out more. The raw material for the blog is identified using ds9 web tracking software. In April if you are going to be at the IC-SDV conference in Nice, do take the opportunity to find out more, Extract Information and deepSearch 9 will both be there.

Section I: IPO Office News

Inter office meetings and agreements

The EPO signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute of Industrial Property of Argentina (INPI) on the introduction of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) to start in January 2019. The CPC is a joint project by the USPTO and the EPO. It is used by 26 patent offices worldwide. A tri-lateral agreement between KIPO, SIPO and JPO was signed at the end of 2017. The offices plan to cooperate in IP matters of common interest. The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property hosted a panel discussion on innovation, availability and affordability of medical products and will publish some articles based on the discussions. The initiative may lead to greater access to medicines, in particular for developing economies. The discussion was not just about patents, and pricing but also about defining the value of innovation. Naturally there is uncertainty surrounding the UK’s membership of many organisations post Brexit. When members of EPO and the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys ( CIPA ) met in January this was one item on the agenda. At the meeting it was confirmed that Brexit will have no effect on the UK’s membership of the European Patent Organization, nor on UK patent attorneys to prosecute patents at the EPO because the EPO is not an EU organisation. The European Patent Organisation was founded in 1973 and has 38 member states. Applicants using the EPO patent system can obtain patent protection in up to 42 countries through a single patent application.

Individual office news

The EPO recently completed an internal reorganization. The ‘patent granting process’ division now has just three sectors 1) mobility & mechatronics; 2) healthcare, biotechnology & chemistry and 3) information & communications technology, mirroring the merging of technology innovations. The Swiss patent office (IGE IPI) published its 2016/2017 annual report recording that most patents with effect for Switzerland and Liechtenstein arrive through the EPO, and that 1,721 national patent applications were submitted and 74 PCT applications. Switzerland and 45 other countries participate in WIPO’s ePCT online filing programme. On a different scale SIPO (Chinese patent office) released their 2017 s tatistics noting 1.38 million national invention and 51,000 PCT patent applications were filed last year. The USA TTAB (Trademark Trial and Appeal Board) is celebrating 60 years of operation in 2018. The TTAB hears ex parte (single party) and inter parte (two or more party) cases. Ex parte cases are usually concerning appeals against registration refusal decisions, whereas the inter-parte cases are mostly oppositions.

Section II: Commercial data, search, analysis

Patent Content

Without good content, good patent searching is going to fall short. Read about IFI Claims Patent Services high quality data preparation process which includes company name standardization, full text machine translations, and expiration date calculations which actually include term extensions for US patents.

Patent Searching and online viewing of results

Ambercite, the patent search product which based on citation analysis and AI to bring a fresh approach to patentability and invalidity searching published an interesting analysis on the Keytruda (pembrolizumab) patent family. Traditional patent searching is based around the use of word searching and classifications. DWPI has just released new manual codes for 2018 with 36 new codes, 15 in the chemical index and 21 in general/ mechanical/ electrical index. The manual codes look up facility can be used by anyone through the Clarivate Analytics website. Gridlogics announced some new search and analysis tools for its PatSeer database including incremental search, filter sets (group multiple filters together for enhanced precision), new bubble charts, new visualizations. IFI Claims published its analysis of the 320,000 US granted (issued) patents from 2017 . The analysis found that IBM was granted the most patents last year. An interactive view is available, and IFI noted eight technology trends from an analysis of growth in patent classification assigned. STN International reported that the handling of Chinese dual filings is now improved on the Derwent World Patents Index. Dual filings occur when a simultaneous Chinese patent for invention (kind code A) and utility model (kind code U) are applied for at the same time. These are not convention equivalents , so are not picked up in patent families. Applicants have the choice later to decide which application to go forward with. The utility model is granted within 6-9 months. DWPI now has a method to find these dual filings and add both to the same family. The # symbol indicates the Utility Model.

Viewing

Patseer also enhanced viewing options allowing language priorities to be set to view equivalents in a family, so if the first language is not present the system defaults to the next choice..

Life Sciences NPL Search and analysis

Clarivate Analytics, is reorganizing and giving the Institute for Scientific Information ( ISI ) a larger role central to its Scientific and Academic Research Group. ISI was established in 1960 by Eugene Garfield and produced the Science Citation Index. Citations analysis remains a vital tool for analysing patent and NPL, and I look forward to greater integration between Web of Science and DWPI. Atrius Health, a US based non-profit health care provider, is using Linguamatics’ NLP (natural language processing) platform to mine unstructured patient data which contains important clinical notes and patient information. The US FDA has also been utilizing Linguamatics’ NLP capabilities to mine drug-label information to discover more about how to prevent potential adverse events from drug-drug interactions. The project looked at co-administration information such as statements regarding time delays recommended in between taking different drugs. Information was sourced from the Daily Med FDA resource of marketed drug labelling. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Global database now contains dissertations from the Philippines Women’s University. PQDT contains 4.5 million dissertations and theses. Two key life sciences databases, Medline and Embase ®, require reloads of their thesauri to take into account changes in terms and the hierarchies each year. They are both available now on STN . For the first time Emtree now includes MeSH terms, making searching easier when searching both files, e.g. for comprehensive searches such as systematic reviews. Emtree 2018 includes 297 new drug terms and many new medical device concepts and device trade names. Full details of the Emtree updates are available.

Business data analytics

The RELX Group acquired ThreatMetrix for £580million. ThreatMetrix software monitors devices, and their locations, and uses anonymized identity and behavioural analytics to identify unusual events.

Data Storage - archiving

ProQuest is now using Amazon Glacier ‘s secure cloud storage service to provide a long term archive for its library customers who need a safe way to secure their purchased digital content. The ProQuest service is called “ SAFE ” and it ensures the preservation and access of 600 Terabytes of ProQuest books, newspapers, magazines, government documents, video and audio material used by ProQuest’s academic library customers.

Section III: IP Legal and IP Management Affairs

China IP Blog China Brand reported that the number of Chinese companies suing western competitors for IP right infringement is growing, one example given was KON which sued Apple. The article also noted that Chinese companies, influenced by China’s ‘go global’ initiative are now registering IP rights abroad. The EU Commission is investigating the possibility to use blockchain technologies to improve the integrity of IP contracts, ownership and licensing agreements. The investigation is part of the Digital Single Market initiatives of which more with the next issue of the blog. Lexis Nexis CounselLink published its 6th annual enterprise legal management trends report which is based on analysis of $30 billion of legal expenditure, 7 million invoices and 1.7 million documents.

Digest XIV - December 2017

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

At the end of 2017 there was lots of news to digest as companies put out their final press releases and round-ups at the end of the year. The blog started by covering 40 organisations in April 2016 and is now following over 60, using ds9 newstracker software. Organisations we track range from the very small start-up to multi-national businesses. We also now follow the major IP offices. Here is our summary of news published online during December 2017, split into two sections with the IP Office news, followed by commercial industry news. We are especially interested in new products and upgrades to existing databases and software particularly for patent search and analysis.

IPO Office News

Inter office meetings and agreements

The EPO and SIPO met in November and signed an ‘Agreement on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’, topics discussed included – ‘patent data exchange, CPC classification, examination capacity building, examination quality improving, patent re-examination, and patent information and cooperation between the IP five offices’ . Another agreement was signed by Brazil and the EPO forming a ‘PPH’, or fast track patent examination procedure for companies applying for patents for the same invention at the two offices. The EPO also announced in December that EP patents can also now be validated in Tunisia. The agreement (originally signed in 2014) provides the same legal effects for a validated EP patent as a Tunisian patent and will be subject to Tunisian patent law. Tunisia joins the ‘extension states’ of Morocco and Moldova , where EP patents can already be validated within six months of the publication of a search report, or upon entering the European phase from an international application.

WIPO has estimated that 3.1 million patent applications were published in 2016, and that Chinese applicants were responsible for 98% of this growth. In 2016 over 230,000 applications were filed under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), according to the WIPO IP indicators 2017 publication. Trademark applications reached 7 million. For the first time WIPO published information on ‘Geographical Indications’ which it collected from 54 countries, and will look at ways to continue to monitor this new form of IP which is administered and protected in a variety of ways.

Individual offices news

At the JPO the handling fee for international applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) will increase at by JPY300 , where the receiving office was not the JPO. Fees also increased at the USPTO where the plan is to recover some costs of USPTO patent operations, such as Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) , and administration. The Swedish government announced the appointment of Peter Stromback as Director General of the Swedish Patent and Registration Office. There are now 50,000 Eurasian Patent Organization ( EAPO) patents ; a medal was awarded to Tsinghua University and Nuctech for this filing. The most active patent applicants are Novartis and Eli Lilly, but the USA files the largest number of applications, mostly using EAPO-ONLINE system.

Trademarks news from the Offices

The Annual TM5 meeting was held late in 2017. Officials from China, Europe, Korea, Japan, and the United States Trademark Office met to discuss progress on 13 existing projects and to agree on new projects. Some example of the cooperative projects are the: “Bad Faith Trademark Project, “Image Search Project” , “User Association Involvement Project”, and “Quality Management Project” . The next TM5 annual meeting will take place in South Korea. Trademark registrations are defined and searched within specific goods and services (Nice Agreement) . The 11th Edition of the International Classification of Goods and Services enters into force in January 2018, a Japanese version is also available courtesy of the JPO.

Research information: Academic, scientific, social sciences,
EBSCO introduced two new indexes this month – one for theologians and one for musicians. Rare music periodicals are now available through EBSCOs ‘Retrospective Index and Online Archive of Music Periodicals.’ (RIPM) . The collection, produced by Le Répertoire international de la presse musicale . RIPM contains music related literature from 1760 to 1966. ATLAS PLUS from the American Theological Library Association, provides over 425 full-text journals on religion and theology in 16 different languages from over 30 countries.

Scientific Literature: Document Delivery
Very often when searching a scientific database which contains abstracts and indexing only we need to source the complete article. FIZ AutoDoc works with many document suppliers to provide copies of literature to STN (and other) customers. One supplier the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC) can now provide document deliveries via e-mail in plain PDF. This makes it easier for readers to access their purchased copies. The plain PDF comes without encryption, and no additional software is needed either. Using these plain PDF copies may also mean a reduced price, as the CLA default copyright charge is applied.

Patent Information: Content
Patent information provider Gridlogics increased its full text patent coverage to an impressive 50 with data (of patent applications, and / or granted patent texts) from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Poland, Uruguay, Singapore, South Africa, and Italy to its PatSeer database.

Patent Information: Search
Each year Clarivate Analytics updates the manual codes used in its DWPI database. As well as helping searchers to identify patents filed in emerging or growing technology fields, these new codes are a good indicator of trending technology areas. 36 new Manual Codes have been added to the 2018 classification. These comprise 15 new CPI (Chemical Patents Index) codes and 21 new GMPI/EPI (General and Mechanical Patents Index and Electrical Engineering Patents Index) codes. Look up DWPI Manual Codes on Clarivate’s website: https://clarivate.com/mcl/

M&A activity
RWS recently acquired Article One Partners (AOP) for $8million. AOP provides an online crowdsourcing platform for clients to pose search questions to over 42,000 IP patent searchers .

People
Mike Morhardt is now Head of Global Sales at Clarivate Analytics . He joins from Forrester Research. Eric Schmidt will become a technical advisor at Google, a new non-Executive Chair is likely to be appointed.

Financials
Alphabet – owner of Google announced its 10Q data in December. Advertising revenue rose by $5.3 million globally this is for cost-per-click / cost per time viewed of an ad, and cost-per-impression.

Digest XIII - November 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Although we are reporting on November news, this is the last edition which will be published this year, so I’d like to start by wishing you all the best for the Festive Season and for the New Year. The blog tracks 75 organisations all of who are active in providing software , and / or services in the information industry and IP world, highlights from the commercial sector were enhancements to Patbase Analytics and I2E, and in the governmental sector a publication commemorating 10 years of the IP5. This month we also report on some IP office events on trademarks and designs. Did you realise that a ds9 newstracker can be set up to follow the published activities of any organisation in any industry? More on this in 2018.

Patent information news from the IP5 offices and WIPO
The blog follows the IP5 offices – EPO, SIPO, KIPO, JPO, USPTO and WIPO and reports primarily on their information related news, and events, starting with meetings and announcements from multiple offices and finishing up with single office events and changes in information products.
So starting with the IP5 who published their annual statistics report this month which indicated that patent applications grew by 10% in 2016 at their offices, meaning they published between them more than 2.6 million patent applications. This year the IP5 celebrated 10 years of cooperation, a cooperation which has notably resulted in two patent information portals of great use to patent searchers as well as to patent examiners - the Global Dossier and the Common Citation Document (CCD ).
EPO and SIPO officially renewed their 30 year-long cooperative relationship by signing a comprehensive, unlimited by time, strategic partnership agreement. No surprise that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and green technologies were included in the collaborative efforts. It was also reported that China is now the 6th largest country of origin for applicants for EPO patents. A strong indication of the usage of IP by Chinese companies to protect their own goods overseas.
The EPO and the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) held a conference in November in Brussels to learn from industry and provide an update on biotechnology patenting in Europe as the two organisations work more closely together to provide more certainty for plant variety innovators in Europe wanting to protect their IP in the most appropriate manner. At the moment only 1 in 3 biotechnology patent applications becomes a granted patent at the EPO.

JPO Deputy Commissioner attended the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) Sixteenth session of the council of Ministers in November. The JPO cooperates with ARIPO through WIPO to support the development of industrial property systems in African countries.
KIPO and WIPO held ‘Appropriate Technology’ Competitions in four countries including El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Panama, and Costa Rica. Appropriate Technology (AT) refers to technology that is developed to suit the environment, cultural, social and economic conditions of a region. The competition encourages the use of technologies described in expired patents to develop low cost solutions. So far products developed have included sugar cane charcoal manufacturing process , bamboo housing, a cooking stove, and herbal oil extractor. China held its 11th ‘China Patent Week’ where IP creation, IP commercialisation and fostering an environment where IP is protected in China are promoted.

IP Offices Trademarks, Designs, Copyright and Cyber News
Executives from the JPO and the USTPO agreed to work in cooperation to create a JP-US common design classification system which should lead to smother industrial designs protections for companies in both countries wishing to protect in the other one. This initiative stems from the ID5 cooperation – analogous to the IP5 for patents, but for industrial designs. The ID5 met in December, and we will publish information related learnings from that event next time. WIPO hosted the 38th SCM (Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications) on Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications law. The meeting considered GUIs and typeface / font based industrial designs, how to prevent country names being used as trademarks, and the issue of trademark domain name registrations was discussed. SIPO has published a concordance between the International Design Classification scheme and its National Economy Industries Classification . This will facilitate the mapping between design patents and China’s industries, allowing statisticians and policy makers to review the usage of design IP in different sectors. The USPTO is looking at ways to remove unused but registered trademarks from the Trademark Register with a simple procedure. Sometimes this would just be to cancel a mark from certain classes. These are some of the options under consideration at the USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB). The Swiss Federal Council is planning a strong approach to protecting creative artist’s work online, without criminalising end-users. The first court dedicated to handling e-commerce and internet related cases opened in Hangzhou China, appropriately all processing by the court is handled electronically. ‘Cyber’ cases rose from 600 in 2013 to over 10,000 in 2016. Finally A Study conducted by WIPO presented the first-ever figures on value of “ Intangible Capital ” in manufactured goods. The results of the study revealed that almost one third of the value of manufactured products sold around the world comes from “ Intangible Capital ,” meaning branding, design and technologies.

Patent information and patent databases
Minesoft launched an enhanced Legal Status Viewer for PatBase this month. The Legal Status viewer integrates data from the European, American and Japanese National Patent Offices, as well as other legal status data into PatBase. Minesoft present several options to view the legal status results for a family including timeline and table views, and there is a priority relationship diagram. Patbase can also show calculated expiry dates which actually do provide for SPC, and Patent Term Extensions where these exist.

IP Analytics
PatBase Analytics v2.0 is now live offering analytics on up to 250,000 records with the availability of 3-dimensional views, and more customizable graphics. Charts and data can be shared and annotated using a “note” function. Users searches can be filtered to focus the analysis on specific assignees, jurisdictions, date ranges and patent types. Users can also take advantage of, Basic Analysis and Standard Analysis. IFI Claims launched its ‘Data Enrichment Dataset’ to coincide with the launch of Google Public Patent Datasets. The IFI data is subscription only, it facilitates accurate company name searching of the patent data.

Scientific and medical databases
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) released the 2018 version of MeSH this month. MeSH 2018 is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus used to index articles for the Medline / PubMed databases, available direct from the NLM and also available on hosts such as ProQuest , EBSCO and STN where additional functionality, content and efficient multi database searching is possible. For 2018 there will be 474 new descriptors (471 terms and 3 new publication types.), 106 replacement updated terms and 7 descriptors deleted. The three new publication types are ‘Adaptive clinical trial’, Equivalence clinical trial’ and Expression of Concern (this is to do with article integrity – not clinical trials).

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
A recently published report by Tractica on AI technologies their potential markets, current value estimated at $ 644 million and potential usages. Of the top ten markets, those relevant for the search / information field are 1) - Visual recognition, classification and tagging. Much has been achieved in facial recognition for photos. Could this one day be re-purposed for patent drawings, and trademark images recognition and retrieval? 2) to improve text mining of unstructured documents, examples given are medical records, but such technology could be utilised for retrieval of patent descriptions and claims. Similarity and semantic search tools are already available, but currently these leave much to be desired. 3) Using AI technology such as Datacap , which can ‘learn’ key parameters and speed up the digitization of paper-based collections. Linguamatics released I2E 5.2.0 , the new interface with access to many more ‘items’ and with Connected Data Technology enabling locally stored data and cloud-based data to be combined together, indexes and queries can be seen in a single tree view, are faster to run, and the results screen makes it easier to identify hits. Lexis Advance was enhanced with data relating to US Department of Defense Boards for the Correction of Military Records. The data related to 127,000 decisions and changes to service records and discharge status, which are important for veterans when they leave the military.

Past Events London Info International
This year the meeting was held at the London Design Centre, a much more convenient and convivial location. Companies exhibiting and talking at the conference were a mix of large publishers, and young technology companies, and some individual academic journal publishers. Noteworthy newcomers were 1 science ( indexing and searchability to a very large collection of scientific and technical publications,) , deepsearch9 (web tracking, indexing, search and analytics for any content collection) , NexGen (healthcare communities builder introduced its new repository for discovery of posters from medical conferences), and Scibite , all are bringing something new to the information scene.

Digest XII - October 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This month the Blog report on new content announcements, new functionality for search and analytics tools, news from the patent offices and a brief roundup of the EPO PIC in Sofia, which as well as the plenary presentation and workshops always has a great exhibition area with many new and established participants from the patent information industry. This year I also met some blog readers which was great, glad you are finding the Blog useful! This month deepSearch 9 collected over 110 stories from 69 companies for the Blog. This month’s highlights are news of the next EPO President, a new pharmaceutical patent information resource, dissertations searchable in google scholar.

News from the Offices
The next president of the European Patent Office (EPO) was announced in October as Antonio Campinos. A Portuguese national, Mr Campinos will begin his new role on July 1st, 2018. Significantly, he brings experience of running both patent and trademark offices - he is currently Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), and he has previously served as President of the Portuguese Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). The President of the EPO is elected by the Administrative Council. The Administrative Council is responsible for supervising the activities of the EPO (Office), approving the budget and appointing the President of the EPO.

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) published its 2016 statistics , interesting to see who the top 10 patent applicants for patent registrations in 2016 were. Namely - Panasonic Corporation, Canon Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Toyota Motor Corporation, Fujitsu Limited, Denso Corporation ,Seiko Epson Corporation, Honda Motor Co., Ltd., Ricoh Company, Ltd., Jfe Steel Corporation. There are lots more charts available for those interested in tracking Japanese technologies, and patenting.

Patent Office Agreements
A validation agreement between EPO and Tunisia was signed and will enter into force on 01/12/17. The EPO also entered into two new ‘Patent Prosecution Highway’ agreements his month with Brazil and with the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO). SIPO (China) and MIH (Cambodia) dignitaries signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby Chinese patents are automatically validated in Cambodia, in return SIPO will provide search and examination assistance to the Cambodia Ministry of Industry and Handicrafts.

Trademarks at EUIPO
Some new rules for trademark filing came into effect on October 1st at EUIPO (the European Union Intellectual Property Office). One change abolished the ‘graphical representation’ requirement for t ‘signs’ . Signs can now be presented in in any way, so long as the representation is clear. The EUIPO will be providing guidelines on what formats are acceptable. A new type of trademark is now available - certification marks. They can be used by certifying institutions to indicate that the awarding body has met the certification requirements.

Patent offices at meetings and trainings
Sino-German Patent System Meeting was held in Beijing. At the meeting the revision of the Guidelines for Patent Examination in China and patent examination under the German Industry 4.0 framework were reviewed. The Japan Patent Office ( JPO) ran a training course on patent examination practice in Thailand . SIPO delegates attended the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI), and at the request of the organisers led a Special Session on China’s intellectual property system development. The AIPPI held its 120th anniversary event in Sydney, Australia.

Patent information
WIPO signed an agreement with International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), to create a database called Patent Information Initiative for Medicines, or “Pat-INFORMED” which will be hosted by WIPO. Twenty pharmaceutical companies have agreed to provide information for the service. Pat-INFORMED will link published patent information, including legal status information to registered medicines to make it clearer what is protected by patents and what is not in the business of pharmaceuticals. Although this data is already available, for example in the US through the Orange Book, it is not available worldwide. This is what Pat-INFORMED hope to achieve. The database should be available mid-2018 with patent information relating to WHO Essential Medicines List.

Patent search and analysis
The EPO recently made some changes to the way it processes US fee payment legal status event codes, and STN have already implemented the new codes into the INPADOC database . From week 2017/43 (23rd October ) onwards the new codes will be in use bringing more specific information which will enable searchers to have a better idea whether the patent is ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ or likely to go either way in the near future. The changes mean that there will be more INPADOC legal events for US fee payment data (11 million to 15 million records). The year of fee payment information is also included. The new codes cover the following USPTO events: Fee Payment Procedures, Filing Fee Payment, Maintenance Fee Payment, Reinstatement After Maintenance Fee Payment Confirmed, And Lapse For Failure To Pay Maintenance Fee, And Refunds.
Gridlogics announced new features to PatSeer which will enhance search and analytic capabilities. There are now fields for Parent Corporate Owner, and industry mapping, and Mathematical Expressions and numbers can be searched more easily and the introduction of a Claims Analyzer.

Citation search and analysis
Ambercite just realised search engine 4.0 with the new AI approach, and also an enhanced display with drawings and abstracts for faster review of retrieved documents. PATSEER now enables search of Forward Cited Examiner Rejections and Examiner citations separately.

Healthcare citations and text mining
EBSCO Health introduced ‘Dynamic Health’ , a resource of evidence-based content aimed at nurses and other front line health professionals which can now be searched on EBSCO Health. The file will be integrated within EBSCO’s HealthStream Learning Center and HealthStream Checklist Management .

Non Patent Literature

Academic, legal and historical, research information
EBSCO are now making available through EBSCOhost and EBSCO Discovery Service five HeinOnline databases. The HeinOnline databases contain legal historical and US governmental documents. The databases include the HeinOnline Legal Classics, and Federal Register (from 1936 ), which are available now and the Code of Federal Regulations, US Congressional Documents (from 1980 ), HeinOnline US Congressional Documents which will be available soon. The Code of Federal Regulations XML Files are available as bulk download through the US GPO and partners open data initiatives. The ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global database (PQDT) can now be searched through Google Scholar. Those searching in an authenticated library gain access to the full text according to their subscription, some dissertations are open access. Dissertations are a useful source for emerging technologies research and for invalidity searching. ProQuest has also expanded its ‘Academic Complete’ ebook collection with the addition of 6,000 ebooks from Taylor & Francis.

Company news
Questel acquired ULT Research . ULT Research develops Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) software and is based in Japan. The software will now be enhanced with Questel’s patent and trademark data.

Financial news
Alphabet , the company who owns Google published its 10Q accounts reporting $14,324m increase in sales over the same 9 month period in 2016. Most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising which is implemented through AdWords, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick AdExchange which customers buy as ‘Cost-per-click’ or ’Cost-per-impression’ and commission on purchases of Apps through Google-Play. Alphabet also reported on its two life science companies Calico (investigating lifespan and diseases related to ageing). AbbVie is a collaborator. And Verily , a health data company.

Forthcoming events

In November Patbase , STN and Questel are all holding user meetings and trainings around Europe. Deep Search Nine , MD Klaus Kater will be talking at the LII conference in December, this year’s meeting will be at the Business Design Centre in London. Klaus’s presentation will be on Managing intelligence in the age of automated deep search and web analysis.

Past events
This year’s EPO PIC conference was held in Sofia, the conference attracted around 330 attendees, and a 35 companies and patent offices took part in the exhibition. The exhibition is a great place to meet newcomers in the patent information field, and this year several companies from the IP service industry also presented. There is a growing trend towards merging of patent information with IP management software. This year Continux GmbH , (IP Management software), octimine technologies (patent search) , Patently (search and IP management), and Teqmine Analytics (task-based search) all made their debut.

Digest XI - September 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This month’s edition of the blog provides news from China (PIAC meeting), a new website from the DPMA, new releases of software from Linguamatics and Patbase, and much more. The blog is created using deepSearch9 ’s news tracking software, and this month we collected over 100 news stories published from 60 organisations to bring you this synopsis of the latest happenings in the wider patent information industry. Click on the links to go to the original articles and find out more.

News from the offices – websites, content and classification matters
The JPO revised a list of 114 technical fields from the FI classification scheme where re-classifications are planned. The new scheme should be available in November. The scheme is revised bi-annually in April and November. Reviewing new and changing FI classifications can provide a useful indicator of technology advances in Japan. From December the IPI (Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property ) will begin classifying Swiss patent applications using CPC (Cooperative Patent Classifications) which will be added in addition to any CPCs added by the EPO on related applications, and the CPCs will not be published on the applications nor will they appear in SwissReg .

An interesting news item from SIPO this month announced that the IPR information system for the national defence industry is online, containing documentation of the military patents filed since 1985. There is also a database of military use software copyrights. The DPMA (German Patent and Trade Mark Office) introduced a new website (in English and German) with improved graphics and functionality suitable for use on mobile platforms. The ‘ Services ’ menu presents legal information on IPR filing and fees, and the ‘ Search ’ menu links to the DPMA databases and services.

Bilateral and other meetings hosted by the patent offices. (EPO, JPO, SIPO, WIPO)
The EPO released a synopsis of their ‘Role of patents in advancing climate change mitigation technologies’ (CCMT) conference/ event held in Athens in September. From the patent information perspective a classification tag is added to patents aimed at renewable energy technologies, and it is good to see the brief extended to include other technologies at this event.

The JPO reported on two bi-lateral meetings the first was with SIPO for a discussion on designs and with the EUIPO on trademarks. Both meetings discussed trends, examination and quality. JPO and SIPO held the 7th Design meeting in late August to share information on design registration system and examination practice, including The Hague agreement, and industrial design forum. The 7th Trademark Experts Meeting held between JPO and EUIPO shared information on trademark trends, examination and quality management. A review of the ‘ Memorandum of Cooperation ‘ (MOC) took place between Japan’s JPO and India’s DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), the agreement was originally filed in 2015 to encourage cooperation in the field of industrial property between the two countries, and has been renewed this year, one aim is to enable the growing number of Japanese companies filing for IP in India to obtain protection earlier. The MOC covers training of ’ CGPDTM’ (India) new examiners, sharing examination practices, information such as gazettes and journals and raising IP awareness. SIPO signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan for cooperation on IP activities. A WIPO team led by Yoshiyuki Takagi, Assistant Director General, met with SIPO Deputy Commissioner for discussions on patent data exchange and international patent classification matters.

Each September the PIAC meeting takes place in Beijing. This year was the 8th meeting, and the largest so far with 4,000 participants, 76 exhibitors and 78 speakers over two days. The event was opened by SIPO Commissioner Shen Chengyu . The conferences theme was; “Patent, Driving the Growth of Real Economy” and featured plenary presentations, breakout sessions and exhibitor workshops providing an overview of the patent information industry in China, and a look at the future with AI implementations from Patsnap, and Patentics, and a look at how to file patents to protect AI methodologies from UNIUS. Another theme was licensing, SEPs, and collaborations, particularly important as Industry 4.0 innovations continue apace.

Legislative
The Unitary Patent moved two steps closer as Lithuania and Estonia both ratified the Treaty. However, the UK and Germany both seem far from ratification, so it is still unclear when the UPC may come into being. It looks unlikely to be early in 2018 now.

Patent Analytics
PatBase Analytics version 2 was released in September, bringing faster analysis of more data, and extended charting, e.g. 3d views. IFI Claims Patent Services has introduced two indicators to help patent analysts get more accurate data on patent expiries, and to work out if a patent is ‘in force’ …….or not. Legal status indicators are provided for US, EPO, German, Canadian, Japanese, UK, French and Spanish patent office data by IFI..

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
Linguamatics introduced a new version of I2E (5.1) bringing additional power and allowing improvements for queries created. A "fuzzy matching" approach enables spellings variants, OCR (optical character recognition) errors, and accents in words to be retrieved. Users can also carry out their own ‘data normalization’ prior to building queries for instance for numeric ranges.

Chemistry and Medical information
STN announced that the CHEMLIST (Regulated Chemicals Listing) database now lists chemicals from the Taiwan Chemical Substance Inventory (TCSI). Organisations in Taiwan must comply with regulations under the Toxic Chemical Substances Control Act, which was introduced in 1986 and has undergone several revisions. 91,000 substances are covered, and registrants include manufacturers of new substances and importers of substances. EMTREE, Elsevier’s life sciences hierarchical classification scheme (ontology) has been revised for the third time in 2017, and is integrated within EMBASE on STN with 2,740 terms added since the May 2017 release. Only 115 of these are drug terms, the majority are cell line names (approx.. 2,000) and medical device trade names (approx. 670).

Commercial information and IP services company news.
Minesoft have appointed the Intellectual Property Publishing House Co., Ltd (IPPH) as a new distributor for Patbase in China . Minesoft have distributors in many countries including Argentina and Isreal. The IPPH, founded in 1980, is the legal publisher for Chinese patent literature under SIPO, and is co-organiser of PIAC meeting. MultiLing , a global patent translation company, appointed a new Sales VP – Jim Watson in September. Averbis announced its participation in a medical informatics research project over four years from 2018 providing text analytics expertise for unstructured data. .

Forthcoming User Meetings
Patbase , STN, and Questel all have announced training and user meetings in the Autumn in various European cities, whilst October sees the Linguamatics Text Mining Summit in the USA. The next issue will be reporting on the EPO PIC meeting in Sofia – the largest patent information in Europe, hosted by the EPO and the Bulgarian Patent Office.

Digest X - July/August 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Autumn! I hope all Blog readers had a good summer. Whilst everyone was away on holiday over the summer, the newstracker was still busy monitoring the wider patent information industry, read more below. The most newsworthy event happened at the end of August with LA based buyout firm Leonard Green & Partners L.P. purchasing CPA Global for £2.4billion in an auction. This figure is 15 times more than CPA’s turnover., and is 2.5 times what Cinven payed for CPA 5 years ago. So why the high level of interest in CPA which led to this high valuation? CPA was founded in 1969, and is the world’s largest IP management company, handling patent renewals, and other IP services for major companies around the globe. Cinven, CPA’s owner for 5 years, invested in CPA’s IT, and was also responsible for the purchase of Innography in 2015, which enabled CPA to offer its clients built in IP analytics to support their IP portfolio decision making, and improved CPA’s technology capabilities in house. This deal is also an indicator of high interest in the IP services sector, where technology savvy start-ups are looking to shake up the industry. Below are a selection of news highlights from the patent offices, product announcements from information providers, and events in the industry which I found of interest, and I hope you will too.

Patents

IP5 Patent office news from EPO, JPO, KIPO, KIPRIS, SIPO

The European Patent Office (EPO) published its first ever ‘ Quality Report’ , a newly implemented annual review of how the Office’s quality policy is implemented in all of its products and services. The report highlights the EPO’s prior art collection – the largest of its kind with over 730 million patent and non-patent literature records in over 85 databases. The EPO makes much of this content available to others through espacenet , and Open Patent Services (OPS). To promote innovation in the field of renewable energy technologies, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the EPO s igned an agreement in April aimed at enhancing co-operation between the two bodies who have been cooperating since 2015 launching the INSPIRE platform . INSPIRE provides access to patents, standards, news, networking and more on renewable energy.

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) released its preliminary statistical data on applications, requests and registrations for June. JPO releases these statistics every month. The stats show that whilst the number of Utility models filed in Japan is falling, trademark applications are up, and design and patent filings are stable. The JPO updated its “ Handbook for PCT International Search and Preliminary Examination in JPO”, a provisional English translation has also been provided.

JPO and the National Institute of Industrial Property of Chile (INAPI) started a PPH (Patent prosecution highway pilot programme) on 1st of August. This is reciprocal and allows Japanese companies to obtain patent rights in Chile more quickly. The JPO had already begun a similar programme with Brazil and Argentina in April. These PPH programmes are important for Japanese companies building businesses in South America, particularly in automotive and manufacturing sectors, patent filings for Brazilian patents by Japanese companies have increased three fold over the last ten years.

Dr. Sung Yunmo will be the new commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office, it was announced in August (News 366).

KIPRIS (Korean Intellectual Property Rights Information Service) most recently published the June KR bibliographic information of Examined and Unexamined applications. Stats on the number of documents published each month is made available.

He Zhimin, Deputy Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office of China ( SIPO ) signed a memorandum of understanding with Armenia. (AM). SIPO delegates also visited Georgia, and signed a 2017-2018 working plan with the National Intellectual Property Centre of Georgia. The China-Georgia free trade agreement was also under discussion. On the patent information front, since June SIPO began publishing CN patent applications, granted patents, registered utility models and designs and legal status information twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

In the US anti-counterfeiting and the global marketplace was also the subject of a seminar. Aimed at helping companies understand more about US IP attaches overseas and how to protect their business using IPRs.

Patent searching
Ambercite ’s first product was Amberscore, this was followed by Ambercite cluster searching, and in June with Ambercite Ai. Both search tools are still available, and whereas Amberscore visually links patent citations, and provided a visual network and score which could be used for analysis, AmberCite Ai brings the data together in a ranked table, built using similarity scoring. The core premise is still the use of forward and backward patent citations to identify similar documents.

Chemistry searching

InfoChem's name-to-structure tool is now integrated in version 4.8 of Thieme’s Science of Synthesis . (SOS) Science of Synthesis is a full text resource for methods in synthetic organic chemistry. It provides information on methods from the 1800s covering organic and organometallic chemistry. . Infochem’s ‘name to structure’ functionality allows users to generate chemical structures from many versions of the chemical name, and search via structure. SOS is continuously updated.

Scientific and technical information sources

Elsevier announced the first edition of an ‘ Encyclopaedia of Sustainable Technologies’ , a new major reference work by, Dr. Martin Abraham.

Citation searching and analysis
Elsevier announced the availability of 2016 annual values for CiteScore on over 22,000 journal titles in Scopus.

Healthcare citations, data and text mining
Linguamatics and RealHealthData announced a strategic partnership in August. The companies will combine Linguamatics Natural Language Processing (NLP) with RealHealthData ®’s database of ‘narrative medical records’. RealHealthData® provides access to the narrative records allowing subscribers to access information on how people actually use drugs, on adverse events, and on product-switching in real-life. RealHealthData ® collects information on age, race, gender, medical information, family history for the records, which are de-personalised.

AI developments
IBM announced a new feature for Watson®’s Tone Analyzer – aimed at customer service applications and chatbots. The Tone Analyser can recognise seven emotional tones from language, and from emojis. An Australian start-up, Oovvuu is using Watson’s AI within its own platform, Compass, to connect videos to relevant news articles. Oovvuu was established in 2014 its aim is to provide advertisers with a view of how their advertising is actually being discovered by internet users amongst news and other content online.

Machine translations software
Omniscien Technologies held a webinar on the use of its Language Studio – advanced machine translation software – in use for complex translation projects such as patents, catalogues and other user-generated content.

Commercial information and IP services company and product news
Anaqua merged with Lecorpio in August, Lecorpio has developed IP management software which can handle the whole process from invention disclosure to patent prosecution management and should complement well Anaqua’s IP management and information suite of products. A survey of 40 start-up companies in Sweden conducted by AWA showed that around 55% had zero IP protection, and were unaware of how patents and trademarks could fit in their business models. Aistemos have moved to a larger HQ still in central London. MaxVal announced Symphony , a new IP management software which syncs with USPTO data. RWS Inovia published its 2017 global IP indicators report. The report began eight years ago surveying IP attorneys and management in house and in legal firms in the US, now it covers six continents, and makes for interesting reading on filing strategies adopted across industries.

Conferences and Events
IP.com presented at the Patent Information Annual Conference (PIAC) in China in September. on ‘ Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Neural Networks’ :

Forthcoming events
A few places are still remaining on the Cambridge Information and IP Meeting Training day which takes place on October 11th in Cambridge, UK. If you are interested in the training but not available on that day, please get in touch so we can let you know when new dates or webinars are available.
The EPO PIC , the event for anyone interested in patent information in Europe takes place this year in Sofia, Bulgaria, providing 3 days of news, exhibition, discussion and networking with 2 days of training either side.

Digest IX- June 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

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 IC SYNTH . New features are the implementation of a genuine reaction graph and a new 'Projects' section to allow for team working. IC SYNTH 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.

Digest VIII - May 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This issue brings news on cooperations and other initiatives from the IP5 patent offices, (China, EPO, Japan, Korea, USA), WIPO and an update on some recent meetings I’ve attended, and a look forward to the forthcoming CIIPM event in July. It is always interesting to review the activities of the IP offices who are always planning ahead for future technology growth areas. Don’t forget that the events section of my website presents an overview of events, conferences and exhibitions in the commercial information space, including IP, information retrieval and other events of interest to our community. The next issue will focus on information industry commercial news. This is only the second issue for 2017, not least because your author has been quite busy this year! I am now planning to resume more frequent publication of the Info blog. News for the Info Blog is primarily created using tracking software from deep Search 9 , but please do also feel free to send me specific items in which you think I may be interested.

News from the IP5 offices

Cooperations are continuing amongst the major offices, as they work to align procedures, and make the most of opportunities to share work, leading to improved patent prosecution timeliness and towards more similar decisions. They are also enabling sharing of best practice amongst the smaller offices. My selected highlights are below.

Asian office news

The Japan Patent Office (JPO) released the 16th edition of its manual for Trial and Appeal Proceedings. Fees were last updated in April 2016. The manual covers application phase for Patents, Utility Models, Designs, and Trademarks, requests for examination, registration, post-registration, opposition, appeal, trial fees and processes. Underlining the growing importance in understanding the interaction of patents with standards, the JPO is cooperating with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to make available to its patent examiners information relating to standards for their prior art searching which underpins quality of the patenting process. The initiative is led by the JPO’s Examination Planning Office, Administrative Affairs Division, Patent and Design Examination Department (Physics, Optics, Social Infrastructure and Design), JPO. It builds on an earlier cooperation between JPO and ISO. (International Standards Organisation).

In April, KIPO and WIPO held the ‘Heads of IP Offices Conference’ ( HIPOC ) bringing together representatives of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. According to the press release the event was led by WIPO’s Mario Matus, with the aim of “increasing the IP capacity of developing countries”.

In March, KIPO (Korean IP Office) opened the Ylang Ylang Herb Oil Center in the Philippines. This new centre builds on existing initiatives between the two countries, and forms part of KIPO’s ‘ Intellectual Property sharing project’ .. There are three threads within the project – AT (Appropriate Technology) dissemination , Branding support project, and Korea Funds in Trust at WIPO through which KIPO aims to assist developing countries make the most of IP for their economic growth. The AT project focusses on creation of technologies for local use, and KIPO officials can carry out prior art searches and assist with patentability matters.

European Patent Office (EPO) news
The 2016 annual report reveals that 96 000 patents were granted. This represents a massive 40% increase over 2015. And in April the EPO and the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) launched a Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot programme. Cooperation agreements with the Institute of Industrial Property of Angola and the National Institute of Industrial Property of Argentina (INPI) were signed in May. These co-operations will revolve around search, examination and automation, and the use and exchange of patent data and databases. The EPO has launched an academic research programme , and the deadline for grant applications for this is 15th June 2017. The programme, set to be annual, has six themes, covering the fields of economics, IP management, IP law and data sciences. Examples provided are: The European patent system's impact on trade and investment in Europe, Patent services and intermediaries in Europe, IP business models and patent valuation methods, Patents for SMEs and universities in Europe, Patents and climate change mitigation technologies, Advanced use of PATSTAT and patent analytics.

WIPO news
The Australian Government made a donation in March to a Voluntary Fund which was set up in 2004 to enable participation of the world’s indigenous peoples in the WIPO run Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore ( IGC ). The fund had run out of cash in 2014. The PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) continues to grow with 233,000 applications in 2016, a 7.3% increase in 2016 compared to 2015. Madrid system trademark applications saw a similar % growth, and industrial design (Hague convention) applications grew by 13.9%, underpinning the importance of designs as an IP asset for global businesses. Four of the top five applicants in 2016 were from Asia underlining the increasing global vision of Asian companies. WIPO also released press release and video footage from their 2016 conference on cybersquatting and domain names. Domain names cases (particularly surrounding the new ‘gTLDs’) increased in 2016. ‘gTLDs’ are the new generic Top Level Domain Names such as .SHOP, .GAMES, of which 1,200 new ones have been released.

User Meetings
This year I have already attended a couple of user meetings, one here in Cambridge, UK in April hosted by Linguamatics, as a ‘ Text Mining Conference’ which anyone with an interest in text analytics can attend. This year about 80 people attended and six Linguamatics partner companies also presented. Linguamatics continue to build their I2E platform, and we were able to preview a new user interface, and attend workshops. Not much to report on the patent information side, but interesting case studies in clinical and other healthcare information and chemical competitive intelligence were presented. Next I headed to Bonn, for a while the capital of Germany, for the PatentSight user meeting. In contrast to I2E, PatentSight’s Patent Asset Index provides statistical patent analytics based on meta tags such as citations, classifications, and other calculated metrics to evaluate individual patents and patent portfolios. PatentSight now have a scientific advisory board, and a growing customer base. We heard from industry customers about the importance of building portfolio benchmarking in to their IP management and strategic functions, and how they use the patent asset index derived views to enable conversations with management who tend to need to see the bigger patent information picture in order to take company-wide decisions.

Forthcoming events
The conference season is almost over, but here in Cambridge Stuart and I are working hard putting together the 2nd Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property meeting (#CIIPM2). This year’s meeting takes place on Wednesday 5th July, at the same venue – Homerton College Conference Centre. We have a full programme of expert talks ranging from strategies to gain patent protection in Europe, managing R&D tax credits, the importance of trade secrets and best practice in managing IP, as well as a look at competitive intelligence with patents. Artificial Intelligence to handle repetitive data tasks is a growing field, and our opening speaker Emily Foges from Luminance will be thought provoking on this topic I am sure. Luminance are also a Cambridge start up company. This year we have a slightly larger exhibition, which I am sure will also prove very useful for attendees , particularly for those looking to find out about the latest software for patent search and analysis, obtaining translations of Asian patents and other literature, and for those who want to know more about protecting their inventions using IP, the UK IPO will also be present.

Digest VII - January 2017

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the first blog of 2017

Introduction

At the end of 2016 , I said I’d write a conferences edition, looking at events of interest to those working in the patent information field. So here it is – as well as looking back at some conferences from 2016, I’m also looking forward to some 2017 events. Perhaps this will help you to decide which meeting to attend, and even if you’re not able to attend, many events make the presentations available on their website, or through SlideShare afterwards.

Why do we attend conferences?

Of course, there are usually multiple reasons, and these differ by organisation. An exhibitor or sponsor will be primarily there for sales reasons. Both meeting potential new customers and with existing customers. Probably also to keep up with their industry, and find out what their competitors are up to. Attendees at conferences, I think particularly information and IP related events, are there too for networking. Given that many in this profession work in companies where they are the sole provider of information services, this is a vitally important aspect, along with keeping up to date with IP analytics software, search tools, and service providers, to make sure they are using the most appropriate for them at the best price. Looking to the future is also important, keeping an eye open to see what new tools may be entering the market.

Attendance at many conferences is declining, but some have stable or even growing numbers of attendees and sponsors. So getting the ingredients right clearly helps. How about location? That must be important too. Most of us prefer an easy-to-fly-to (or train to) location, an attractive city, and a nice, reasonably priced hotel also help.

How to choose a conference

Who hosts conferences? And what makes for a good event? Knowing who is organising the conference or event, and thinking about why they may be hosting it can help you choose the most appropriate event. Also it’s important to choose between an event which offers an exhibition, if your main objective is to compare the patent search tools or other IP software available, or to choose a conference or learning based event when you are looking for new insights and educational elements too. Events are discussed below, and are grouped according to the type of organisation putting on the event, starting with those hosted by patent offices, then looking at vendor events, and finishing with the independent events. Extract Information maintains a calendar of forthcoming events, to help you with planning. Hope to see you at a conference in 2017!

Patent Office events
The IP5 patent offices all host events, those offering full conferences with exhibitions are hosted by the European Patent Office (EPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office ( KIPO) and China IP Office (SIPO). The event organised by JPO is primarily an exhibition. The USPTO and WIPO do both host events, but these tend to be focussed on particular aspects and are more informational, or involve specific focus or other user groups. The annual EPO PIC is the largest and well respected patent information conference in Europe with about 400 attendees from industry, the IP offices, many search, management, and legal professionals attend. This year 29 organisations exhibited, and these comprised 11 patent database providers, 3 translation companies, 3 patent offices, 4 analytics companies, and 8 other service providers. The 7th Patent Information Annual Conference of China (PIAC) was held in Beijing with over 4,000 attendees, a conference and exhibition in October, it is the largest event of its kind in China. The European Patent Office also hosts Search Matters, usually in March, alternately in Munich or The Hague, and East Meets West, in Vienna. Search Matters has no exhibition, and it is a great place to learn how the EPO examiners approach patentability searching. East Meets West is a must to keep up to date with Asian patent information, patent prosecution and legal practice.

Vendor events
Increasingly providers of databases and other IP information software host their own events, inviting users and also potential customers, interested in finding out more. These events can be a useful introduction, and because competitors will not be present, the host organisation may be more open. In October 2016 Aistemos held it’s annual Cipher User Conference, in London, UK and Questel, also hosted several events around Europe, including a day dedicated to “ Intellectual Property & data analysis challenges in life sciences and chemistry” . Linguamatics hosts bi-annual Text Mining Summits for its community. The autumn event takes place in Chatham, MA, USA in October, and in the spring a similar event takes place in Cambridge, UK. Linguamatics’ summits present practical approaches to text mining and knowledge discovery and are a good place to learn about latest developments to I2E, which may be put to work on patent data as well as life sciences publications.

Other events
In Europe there are several independent meetings which have a large patent information element. In April, II-SDV organised by Christoph Haxel and located in Nice provides an opportunity to look to the future of information retrieval, and IP analytics. The 2017 programme already looks very interesting. Whereas in June the largely German speaking event PatInfo , organised by the Technische Universitaet in Ilmenau, Germany, focusses on current practice with talks on patent searching such as approaches to Freedom to Operate (FTO), and patent management with a good mix of speakers from universities, patent offices and industry. IPI Confex, takes place in March, in Italy, the programme features patent office speakers, several vendors, and industry participants, with an update on CEPIUG Certification progress from Bettina de Jong. Further afield, the PIUG , the US-based Patent information User Group holds several events throughout the year, its annual conference in May, the biotechnology meeting in February, and a North East conference in September. The events present a mixture of talks from patent users, and software providers, all are selected by programme committees to retain impartiality, and quality of talks. Each event has an exhibition as well as the plenary talks. Last year PatentSight attended the PIUG NE conference. Last year closer to home saw the 1st Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property Meeting ( CIIPM) get off the ground. This new meeting, created space for technologists, legal professionals, IP analysts, and patent information industry companies to look at IP, information and commercialisation issues. The 2nd CIIPM is planned for 5th July 2017, and the programme, which will be centred around early stage innovation and information considerations will be announced later this month. India is of growing importance in the patent information world, and this is no surprise given the number of patent information professionals working there, many for global companies. GIIP held the first IP Skills summit , in Bangalore which featured full length presentations, networking and some very information panel discussions. The first conference of each year is probably the GIPC event with IP legal, technology transfer, and information strands in January for the last two years in New Delhi.

Hope to see you at a patent information event in 2017!

Digest VI - November 2016

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

The November publication of the InfoBlog brings another extended issue, the Autumn being quite a busy time for conferences! The blog provides an overview to new information products, applications and other development in the world of patent information, IP and scientific information. This blog is organised by type of news, so new database or other information sources are all together, interface and functional improvements are together, not by vendor. The blog provides a brief overview of what’s happening in the world of IP information with links to the complete announcements, so you can choose to read in full items of interest. Also included are patent information meetings and events, company announcements, and activities at the IP offices. When the IP offices are introducing new search, translation or other tools for search, these will be found in the relevant section. The news which appears in the blog is collated using tracking software created by Deep SEARCH 9 . Deep SEARCH 9 provides a fast, fuzzy yet precise method to collate news, meaning more time for review and analysis, less time opening emails.

Patent information - sources, content, search, review and analysis

Database content
No new database content was announced this time round.

Patent search and analysis
Ambercite introduced a new version of its ‘cluster searching’ – allowing users to pull together in a single set documents related by family as well as by citation. Ambercite’s approach for finding relevant documents uses proprietary algorithms based upon linking three generations of citations in both directions for similarity. The Japan Patent Office published updates to its FI patent classification scheme in November. FI classes can be a useful tool for searching Japanese art. The revised codes are implemented for older documents when these are re-classified. FI classes are more detailed, but based on, IPC, and can be more detailed that CPC in areas of technology in which Japan leads. Minesoft have added a semantic search tool for PatBase . It can be used to supplement a text search, and it replaces the ‘Similarity search ‘ option. And WIPO is busy improving Patent Translate – its machine translation software for Patentscope by adding artificial intelligence functionality. A beta test version is available for Chinese language to English language translations The EPO announced plans to introduce full text searching in espacenet. A new mobile-friendly interface to access espacenet on the go is also planned.

Subject specific searching – chemistry, maths, life sciences

Another improvement for Patbase is a new thesaurus which combines Minesoft’s chemical Search, language Explorer, and dictionary and thesaurus. It provides another way to find synonyms, keywords, acronyms and translations to search for in PatBase . This makes it easier to refine and extend search strategies as you go. Users of STN now have additional chemical structure drawing options with deuterium (D) and tritium (T) atoms available in the structure editor Common Atoms palette. This allows more precise searches in CAS REGISTRY, DCR and DWPIM. Searching Greek letters, commonly used in mathematical formulae, and as units, can be performed on STN using the Greek letter, or the word spelt in Latin-alphabet. Using NLP to improve patient selection was demonstrated at a recent Text Mining Summit in the US , organized by Linguamatics. A hackathon showed how using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on the I2E text mining platform can be useful to improve clinical trial design and patient recruitment when accessing data from clinicaltrials.gov and patient records. These two data sets are commonly used when setting up clinical trial.

Post-search export, share, workflow options
Search is just the beginning, most result sets will be examined, refined, and iterated by a ream. In recognition of this Minesoft has introduced a new Export module for PatBase , which can be customised. For instance legal status information can be included and filters for country and date are available. STN / CAS also continue to improve its Export to Excel options for ‘new’ STN.

Analysis and visualisation tools, large scale data sets and value measurements
At the Munich based IP Service World event Mtc showed how to use tableau to analyse large patent data sets, using patent filing information, and patent classifications to create temporal trends analysis and geographical maps to show up regional variations. Methods to find ‘important’ patents , particularly within large database sets, without actually reading the documents are popular, and usually involve some kind of ‘scoring’. Ambercite have developed their own metric – Amberscore.

IP and economics
The second edition of a report first published in 2013 by EPO and EUIPO has been updated. The report looks at all IP rights - patents, trademarks, designs, copyright, geographical indications and plant varieties- and matches them to industries and quantifies the contribution of IPR-intensive industries in the EU. The study found that over 42% or EUR 5.7 trillion is generated by IPR intensive industries.

Scientific literature
12 non-patent literature (usually called scientific literature – outside of the patent information sphere) databases are now available to PatBase users. The sources include Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and Scopus, and Agricola, AGRIS, CiteSeer, Highwire, IEEE, Inspec, science.gov, PubMed, WorldWide Science, Google Scholar, SpringerLink.

News, Announcements, Cooperations from the IP offices.

Asia
The Japan Patent Office published its national statistics on patent, trademark, design and utility model filings updated with 2015 data .

Europe .
The EU unitary patent system is slowly getting nearer to reality, as the UK ‘s Baroness Neville-Rolfe, announced that the UK is planning to ratify the Unitary Patent Court Agreement. This has been subject to doubt since the UK referendum secured a majority to leave the EU on 23 June 2016.

USA
The USPTO issued examples showing how best to draft patent claims in the life science fields of vaccines and diagnostics. The USPTO has revised its examination guidance, after the Myriad and Mayo cases which concerned subject matter eligibility of naturally occurring things. See Section 101.

International
The World Intellectual Property Organization is making its extensive IP reference collection available under an Open Access policy . This will enable policy-makers, researchers, practitioners and anyone else to use and build upon these resources, sharing knowledge and expertise – one of WIPO’s own goals. The 5th meeting of the TM5. was held in China in October. It looked at ‘bad-faith’ trademark filings, quality issues arising due to the increase in trademarks filed worldwide. Since 2012, the JPO, EUIPO, KIPO, SAIC and USPTO have discussed cooperation on common issues regarding trademarks and in 2017 a joint meeting will be held with INTA , (the International Trademark Association) and the 2017 TM5 meeting will be hosted by EUIPO. ID5 – The same five offices have started collaborating on industrial design rights with the second meeting held in China in November. The group plan to create a website, to collaborate on priority data, classification methods, and to collect statistics and create user documentation to improve awareness of IPR for designs.

Next month – coming soon
December’s issue will review recent conferences , meetings and events. And round up with a discussion of trends in patent information provision in 2016.

Digest V - September 2016

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

This month I’m pleased to announce that it is now possible to subscribe to the blog. Sign up directly to receive an email with direct link to the blog page and receive updates as they are published. Another encouraging sign, is that database vendors and other software providers have started sending me copy for the blog. This is great, and please all note that the aim of the blog is to focus on new products, content improvements, improvements in search tools, and IP management software. The blog also reports on patent information meetings and events attended by companies tracked, as well as news from the IP offices of interest to patent information users.

Patent information - sources, content, search, review and analysis

User interfaces of patent information products are the first step towards search and vendors aim to ease the search process and make choices clear as possible for searchers.

Searching patents is definitely a multi-lingual experience with more than half of new applications published each year in languages other than English. Users can either search machine translations into English of the non-Latin text source documents, but vendors are also offering original language interfaces for search. Patseer has introduced Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Thai search forms.

Patent searching and analysis
Ambercite published a comparison table of cluster search (their proprietary technology) vs. a generic model of traditional search methods and functionality (boolean / proximity). This may be of interest for those who want to understand whether to include citation cluster based analysis in their patent work. Thomson Innovation has a new ‘Smart search’ feature, which the blog will find out more about for next time.

There has been some activity in the chemical structure search and chemical name indexing to assist search and categorisation of chemistry patents recently. Questel announced the integration of ChemAxon’s chemical searching and indexing capabilities into Intellixir, it’s post-search analysis software. This will permit the identification and search of chemical structures and substructures in both patent and scientific literature.. Patseer has also improved its chemical name look up options to help searchers to find additional synonyms. STN has also improved structure searching in its version of Derwent Markush Resource (DWPIM), Derwent Chemistry Resource (DCR) and REAXYSFILE_Sub on the new STN platform. The enhancements include extra precision for sub-structure search (CSS), element count, atom lock, ring lock and matching.

Post-search results viewing
This is often the most time consuming part of any analysis – reviewing the returned results for relevance to the question in hand. Gridlogic’s PatSeer has made some improvements for its customers who can now view results in family groups (simple or extended), and for review of individual selected sections of the full text in separate windows. Thomson Innovation introduced a ‘Results Dashboard’ approach in June.

Analysis and visualisation tools
Handling large datasets can be challenging, and Thomson Innovation’s ThemeScape views offer users a text-based approach to categorising a set of documents. However preparing ThemeScape maps can be challenging, and the charts can be difficult to interpret, in recognition of this TI have introduced a semi-automated approach to preparing.

Portfolio monitoring and competitive intelligence
Software for Intellectual Property GmbH (SIP) has provided IP management software since 1999, and now it also offers monitoring tools to enable the tracking of third party patents and other IP rights, based on DOCDB data.

Database content
Patent documents are published and often referred to using publication numbers. These numbers are actually made up of three parts, the country code, the publication number itself and the kind code. The kind code represents the type of publication, e.g. application, grant, correction of either and may have a letter (usually A or B) as well as sometimes, a number (1 or 2) representing loosely the number of times the document has been published. These kind codes are maintained and organised by WIPO . STN announced this month that the EPO’s INPADOC database, which it hosts, has recently introduced a change to the kind code for patent publications from South Africa (ZA). The patent law of South Africa allows for a single publication (of the granted document), so the kind codes are being changed from A to B to reflect this. Publication years 1971 to 1996 and 2015 are affected. All newly published INPADOC records will have the kind code ZA B.

Academic literature – dissertations
ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses Global (PQDT) database has been licensed to fifty universities in Russia. This interesting database contains approximately four million post-graduate theses which are indexed for search using assigned subject terms and keywords. PQDT Global has a Russian interface and translated abstracts. As well as being invaluable for basic research, in science and humanities, dissertations can be a fruitful source of NPL for invalidity searching.

IP and innovation management tools
MaxVal this month announced a new product called SymphonyIAM ; a platform which includes invention and portfolio management, including managing annuity payments.

From the IP offices.

Asia
China , Mongolia and Russia have signed an agreement to cooperate in seven areas to build a trilateral economic corridor, The three countries aim to improve transport facilities, renovate ports and overhaul customs procedures for easier clearance, as well as closer cooperation in energy and mineral resources, high tech, manufacturing, agriculture and forestry, and intellectual property matters. IP statistics from Japan. Latest figures from the JPO Statistical Database can be downloaded from the JPO website. Data includes no. patents filed, utility model applications filed, design and trademark applications, the number of registrations, the number of trials and appeals, the number of international applications for patents, trademarks and designs, and the number of requests for examination. Stats are updated monthly. JPO has updated examination guidelines , and added case examples on how it proceeds with ‘Internet of Things ‘patent examinations. Legal IP enforcement in China . Protection of intellectual property rights in China is carried out by three special courts - in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. IT infrastructure in the courts is being improved to facilitate dissemination of the decisions to third parties. SIPO, is also striving to improve the quality of patent enforcement with the Patent Administrative Enforcement (Trial) management system.

Europe
The European Patent Office (EPO) and the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) held a joint workshop to exchange information on plant-related patents and plant variety rights. The two organisations are sharing knowledge, expertise and working practices, which includes databases and other working tools. This workshop stemmed from an agreement on closer cooperation established earlier this year. The Netherlands has ratified the Unitary Patent Court Agreement , making it the 10th country to do so. The Unitary patent system can only enter into force when thirteen countries have ratified, and these must include France, Germany and the UK. France has ratified, Germany is progressing towards ratification, but the UK position remains unclear due to Brexit. A new user group (EuroIPG) of Japanese IP professionals in Europe met with JPO officials in Dusseldorf in September .

USA
This month the America Invents Act (AIA ) turned five, and New Mexico state got it’s first Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC). The modern PTRC network began in 1871 when federal law allowed for the distribution of printed patents to libraries for public use. There are now 85 centres in the PTRC network. The AIA brought about new post grant proceedings in the USA including the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), giving patent search a more prominent position in the US examination and prosecution process.

Commercial information vendor news

EBSCO has redesigned its customer support site, which was introduced ten years ago in 2006. Now called EBSCO Help , the site has a simple browse architecture, with product-specific pages, topic-specific pages, and a search engine for those customer to use who still don’t see what they’re looking for. The sale of TR’s Intellectual Property & Science (IP&S) business is now finalised. A new company, Clarivate Analytics , has been formed, which will operate all of the well know search and information management software and databases from CortellisTM to Thomson InnovationTM, Vin Caraher is the CEO of Clarivate Analytics. Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia are the ultimate owners, and they paid $3.55 billion in cash for the business.

Patent information meetings

The 7th Patent Information Annual Conference of China (PIAC) took place this month in Beijing, the event is hosted by Intellectual Property Publishing House Co., Ltd. Over 4,000 delegates attended the meeting emanating from IP offices, industrial companies and commercial vendors from around the world. Some also represented user groups such as PIUG, and PDG. The annual Cipher User Conference will take place in London on 20 October., and PatentSight attended the PIUG NE conference . Linguamatics are planning their bi-annual Text Mining Summit , the autumn event takes place in Chatham , MA, USA in October, the summit will present practical approaches to text mining and knowledge discovery and naturally present latest developments to I2E. Also in October Questel is hosting a day dedicated to “ Intellectual Property & data analysis challenges in life sciences and chemistry” with industry and vendor speakers.

Digest IV - August 2016

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

The fourth edition of the digest contains selected news from commercial information and service providers, and IP offices such as IP5 and WIPO. Naturally the focus is on patent information, also I include other news items which I find interesting. These range from new search or analysis technologies, to new content, and software for data delivery. Maybe introduced in areas outside of IP information, but with potential to add value to the IP information world. For instance, in August ProQuest and Reuters introduced solutions for filtering video, photo and multimedia streaming content. I have a long standing interest in the retrieval of image data from searching in the devices and mechanical patent fields, where only by reviewing the drawings can the invention be fully understood. Technologies to search and review film, YouTube clips and other visual content, may one day be picked up by patent, and trademark information vendors.. What else is new?

Focus on patent information - content, search, review and analysis

Content – Google patents now contains full text, fully searchable, machine translated patent applications and granted documents from several European countries – namely Germany, UK, France, Spain, Russia, Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Luxembourg and Belgium. Google has also added new options for refining the search, and filtering results.

Product news : Patent searching and analysis all in one platform was announced by Gridlogics with PatSeer Pro. PatSeer Pro combines Gridlogics ’ two products into a Web 2.0 version, making it easier to search, clean the data, visualise and analyse data without having to download and install special software to your laptop, or upload the selected data set to another product for analysis.

Patent legal status – is that patent in force?

Another product enhancement for Patbase. Minesoft is busy improving legal status search and review on Patbase. Minesoft uses direct feeds from national registers, and has recently added 25 new ones including Austria, Chile, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore and Vietnam to enhance the INPADOC data, which is updated every Thursday. Legal status search of litigation information from the US is now live; with search for plaintiff, defendant, date, court. Also useful when reviewing results from a search - an indicator shows which patents have US litigation information. This could be interesting in itself, as patents which are attacked in court are usually ‘important’ in their market.

Patent classification codes are developed by the patent offices for categorising patent applications for examination purposes. These codes are also valuable for search purposes. Japan has two national classification schemes, FI and F term.. For technologies where Japanese companies are globally important, such as displays, medical devices, printing, and consumer electronics the Japan Patent Office (JPO) FI codes should be consulted. They provide more detailed definition of concepts for search than is possible with IPC, and in some cases CPC. FI classifications are updated twice a year. Information on changes, and reclassifications can be found on the JPO website.

Scientific information and discovery tools

CAS , (Chemical Abstract Service) is currently testing a new version of SciFinder - SciFindern - , which should be on the market in Q2 2017. SciFindern continues to link ‘human curation’ with powerful ICT capabilities to improve search and filtering, it was announced at the ACS National Meeting. The InfoBlog will seek out more detail for next time……

Scientific literature, analytics and research in Asia
EBSCO puts analytics, big data and altmetrics to work in China with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC). Plum™ Analytics, will be utilised by the ISTIC-EBSCO Joint Laboratory for Big Data Research and Discovery. Plum Analytics is owned by EBSCO. At the ISTIC academic publications will be monitored and quantified, creating altmetrics at an early stage for the institute. These measures should enable ITSIC to gauge outside interest in its research . Changes are also taking place in China to allow financial rewards from academic research to be retained by the institutes, and inventors, as reported by SIPO.

Humanities research data news
ProQuest has begun distributing the Visual History Archive from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education . The Archive includes testimonies from survivors of genocides. Video footage is accompanied by 62,000 manually indexed search terms, allowing researchers to filter search results down to a per minute section of the video.

From the IP offices: news on documentation, legislation and more

WIPO / PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty)
Kuwait and Djibouti recently joined the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). The PCT, which publishes patent applications bearing the (WO) country code, and is administered by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), allows a single patent application to proceed to prosecution in any of the 150 member countries, and buys the applicant extra time to build the innovation prior to costly translations and examination fees become payable.

In Asia SIPO (China) is reducing patent fees from September for SMEs and individuals in a new policy, which will reduce the first 6 years of renewal fees and some filing costs.
On trademarks - Chinese trademark registrations reached 11.2 million in June 2016, and over 1.74 million trademark applications were filed in the first half of 2016. Since 2002, the Chinese trademark registration application has ranked first in the world for 14 consecutive years.

In Europe The Swiss IP Office (Institut Fédéral de la Propriété Intellectuelle) announced a consultation on the Draft of the “Swiss Made” Ordinance for Cosmetics. Organisations should send comments by 30th September. Innovation in Europe: The GII 2016 report shows Switzerland is the most innovative country, followed by Sweden, and the UK.

Legal information and delivery of services Research news

Thomson Reuters announced a new collaboration with the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School with a one-year fellowship for the Legal Design Lab’s innovative work developing novel approaches aimed at improving the delivery of legal services. In particular by finding new approaches for dispute resolution such as online and exploring other alternatives, ideally new make dispute resolution mechanisms should be more efficient, but also improve access to justice. Another goal should be to make the outcomes transparent to third parties, who may have an interest in the outcome. This is currently not always easy, and may often not be available in a timely fashion.

Commercial information; data and technologies

Mobile delivery of data is increasingly important, and the challenges of delivering the data in ‘edible’ chunks suitable for smart phones and tablets are being addressed. Reuters has partnered with ONEm Communications for its interactive SMS technology. Mobile Operators can use the new technology to provide search, filter and display options for Reuters news content. This technology will help Reuters to reach the estimated 3 billion people who rely on mobile devices for their news coverage. The service is multilingual.

Visualisation of news

Reuters also formed two new partnerships around news visualisation. The first with semantic technology company Graphiq . Graphiq enables data visualizations which will be made available to Reuters customers and within news coverage on Reuters.com. Of most interest to InfoBlog readers, Graphiq provides visual feeds on company news, and health, and sports. And the second with Samsung. Reuters, and Samsung have partnered to produce Focus 360 . Focus 360 visualises the world’s news using 360 degree video and photography content and Samsung Gear 360 cameras and editing technology.

Publisher and IP service provider company news.

Services, Sales

AWA Patent is expanding, and looking to recruit new innovation consultants, indicating strategic growth of its commercialisation related IP business. The new unit will be led by John Karlström, Head of Sales at Awapatent.

Client/ User Meetings and other Events

Aistemos is hosting a series of webinar on Cost Management and Patent Strategy, the third webinar is planned for September 21st, and Aistemos also has its user conference planned on October 20th. STN are holding their UK user day on September 14th in London.
Patent search services are offered by ip-search , the search organisation of the Swiss patent office , for the first time they have a user conference in the USA in San Francisco on 12 October 2016.

PatentSight GmbH will be at the ICIC meeting in Heidelberg, Germany in October, as will the author!

ip-search is inviting IP professionals from the USA to a customer event at the de Young Museum in San Francisco under the motto “Boost your innovation services with Swiss premium patent searches”.

Digest III - July 2016

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The big news of the month arrived with confirmation that Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia had agreed to purchase Thomson Reuters IP & Science business and I can definitely say this is not one of the options anyone I spoke to considered! The commercial / professional information industry has been somewhat stalled of late, pending this decision, so it’ll be interesting to watch the changes unfurl, and to find out what the vision of the new owners will be for this diverse portfolio spanning IP, life sciences but also scientific and social sciences information tools. TR products included in the sale are Web of Science, Thomson CompuMark, Thomson Innovation, MarkMonitor, Thomson Reuters Cortellis and Thomson IP Manager.

In June a couple of new IP management tools were announced, this is definitely a growth area at the moment as those in the IP services business are looking at providing tools to industry which cover the complete technology innovation lifecycle.

Closer to home Extract Information successfully co-hosted, with PSIM , the 1st Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property Meeting. This new meeting gathered together technologists, legal professionals and information and IP analysts, and several information industry companies attended as exhibitors - Aistemos, CAS and Minesoft, and Linguamatics, who attended.

The 2nd CIIPM is planned for 5th July 2017.

Focus on patent information - content, search, review and analysis

Content

Gridlogics’ PatSeer now includes US Patent litigation data for over 55,000 cases from 1990 to date. A litigation indicator in search results highlights the cases.

Patent searching and analysis

Chemical information resides in chemical names, and finding them can be tricky, when you need information outside of that exemplified and claimed in patent applications. Minesoft has invested in Chemical Name Entity Recognition software, to create Chemical Explorer which can find chemical entities in multiple languages, - French and German have been added to English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Patent families, of the unconventional type

Since 2009 the Chinese patent system has allowed parallel filing of an invention patent (kind code A) and a utility model (kind code U) on the same day to protect the same innovation. Companies make use of the dual filing strategy to achieve fast protection with the utility model application, followed by a strong patent protection. On STN’s INPADOC database these dual filings are now recorded in the same family, making it easier to find them.

FIZ Karlsruhe have identified over 330.000 of these non-convention equivalents filed since February 2010. The citation category “R” in INPADOC is used to establish the dual filing relationship in the INPADOC patent family. The utility model application number is added as a technical priority to the related CN A publication to establish the family relationship.

As legal documents patents are enforceable for a limited time span over a limited geography (referred to as legal status)

IFI CLAIMS has been working to provide a simple solution to the problem of identifying whether a patent is in-force or not. It’s patent status indicator is now available, and for granted patents has six values , and for patent applications four. Expiry dates are also available. IFI CLAIMS has provided legal status data for US patents for many years and has now extended coverage to include Germany (country code DE) and EPO (country code EP).

Thesauri and Classification

Minesoft has released a new, multi-disciplinary Thesaurus which will help Patbase searchers to formulate better queries. The thesaurus allows entry to specialist subject areas such as Genes and Proteins, Chemicals or Languages. Links to third party resources such as the National Institution of Biological Information and Wikipedia are also available.

Patseer has also announced a Thesaurus function for Names - Assignee, Inventor, Attorney - and Subject , helpful for grouping and analysis.

Viewing

Making sense of results is often more time consuming than the search itself, and Patseer, in recognition of this, has introduced a Keyword-in-Context (KWIC) feature for patent family members at Simple and INPADOC family type.

Focus on Scientific information AKA NPL (non-patent literature to patent searchers)

Scientific literature
An ongoing trend is the integration of patents and non-patent-literature for search in a single product and this month Gridlogics announced that search of PubMed, IEEE, DOAJ, Springer, Agricola, Agris, and ScienceDirect can take place directly through PatSeer, though in some cases this is by subscription only. I look forward to the time when we have a truly integrated search tool linking patents and non patent literature.

Search, find, and understand

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP (natural language processing)
Linguamatics received a Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award for NLP-based text mining. Linguamatics, who also turned 15 years old this month, were recognised for the I2E platform. I2E enables precise answers to be unearthed using sophisticated search techniques from large data environments , and for companies where precision and targeted information seeking are becoming must haves. Linguamatics works with 17 of the top 20 life sciences companies, and is now also growing activities in the healthcare market.

Citations, searching, analytics and data tracking
Usage of scientific literature metrics can help make sense of the growing number of publications, and Thomson Reuters hosted the Japan Research Fronts Award , recognising 12 leading Japanese scientists, and promoting the use of Research Fronts, a metric used in Web od Science, to assess scientific publications, and therefore research itself. Although declining in importance in some technologies, Japan scientists in the following fields were found to be highly influential according to the metrics – materials: electroceramics, fluorescent OLEDs, engineering: stochastic thermodynamics, chemistry: cobalt catalysis and cross-coupling reactions of ethers, medical: cardiovascular medicine, mechanism of dopamine neuron activity, and signalling at the atomic level in neuroscience.

Academic literature and research in Europe

Thomson Reuters published a list of Europe’s Most Innovative Universities, based on academic papers published and patents filed, the methodology behind the list is available here .

My analysis by country based on TR’s listing follows:

Interestingly though, the highest ranked University is in neither the UK nor Germany, but Belgium - the KU Leuven - , well known IP analytics world for their organisation name harmonisation work.

Arts, Humanities, Music literature

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) publishes the RILM abstracts , a comprehensive international bibliography of writings on music covering publications from the early 19th century to the present. This rich resource is now available for search on EBSCO

IP office news on documentation, legislation and other factors of interest to information users.

The IP5 The 9th Meeting of the IP5 Heads of Office was held in Japan, the meeting was chaired by Hitoshi Ito, Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO). At the meeting, the heads of the Offices listened to the achievements of the IP5 cooperation over the past year, and approved projects such as the Global Dossier, patent information dissemination policy, and common patent prosecution highway (PPH). SIPO signed a cooperation agreement on IP with the Republic of Uzbekistan. SIPO will be classifying all patent applications from all technologies using the EPO’s detailed CPC, as well as WIPO’s IPC, in all technologies.

In the Antipodies; New Zealand is proposing to introduce a Register of Geographical Indications. Geographical Indications help to protect consumer products from particular areas which are recognised for quality. Exports of New Zealand wines, particularly that Sauvignon Blanc, so popular in London right now, are booming, and this move aims to assist the industry further in new markets, such as China. For more on Geographical Indications, see: http://www.wipo.int/geo_indications/en/

In Asia; teaching IP to young people is one area where China is definitely leading, and this month a new programme for STEM postgraduate students was initiated at Wuhan Institute of Technology in Hubei province. It covered IP, innovation and entrepreneurship topics such as IP strategies, patenting systems and patent drafting skills. SIPO renewed its commitment to using the CPC patent classification. SIPO has committed to classifying all invention patent applications in every technology field using CPC, and to share the relevant classification data with the EPO. The EPO provides training and assistance. The CPC or Cooperative Patent Classification Scheme is in use by an increasing number of offices worldwide, as it allows more sophisticated search and better allocation of new patent applications for examination purposes. Contentious IP matters i n China the SIPO department in charge of patent administration must conclude patent disputes mediation within two months, or drop the case. However, if a case is very complex the mediation period may be extended to three months. Three courts in China, Beijing, Tianjin Municipality and Hebei Province met to discuss closer cooperation, and agreed that intellectual property (IP) cases in the region should be dealt with mainly in Beijing.

In Europe; a conference in Munich discussed the implications for the forthcoming Unitary patent, and Unitary patent courts, post Brexit vote in the UK. Whilst exiting the EU would mean the UK could not participate in the UPC, as currently enabled, but it has no effect on the UK’s membership of the European Patent Organisation. See the editorial written by Jane in last quarter’s edition of World Patent Information for an overview of the UP and UPC. The UPC (Unitary Patent Court ) got two steps nearer in June as Germany and The Netherlands moved towards ratification. It remains to be seen what will happen post –Brexit wrt. the UK and the Unitary patent.

Software for Invention harvesting, IP management, IP strategy

Aistemos hosted a roundtable discussion on the changing role of IP and IP Strategy, illustrating how access to data helps companies to maximise the value and reach of their own IP, but highlighted the necessity for IP professionals to breach the language gap and learn how to communicate with business leaders. They also conducted a survey, which showed that IP is associated with negatives - risk and cost, rather than in as a positive asset. A summary can be found here: http://blog.aistemos.com/2016/07/ip-strategy-in-boardroom-around.html

IdeaScout, software to assist with very early stage of the innovation lifecycle - harvesting and measuring, is being beta-tested by Innography, and was evaluated by Outsell , the information industry market research company, last month. Innography is now owned by CPAGlobal. Another company highlighted in the Outsell report was AULIVE. Aulive , a Belgian company also provides software and training in the innovation and IP management space.

Thomson IP Manager Core Solutions has been adapted for smaller companies. The software offers the usual collection of IP management modules, with IP rules look up, and communication options to assist companies with innovation lifecycle management tasks.

Other software;
IBM announced ‘ Watson Conversation’ . Watson Conversation Service aims to help developers to build and train a bot – a bot can control a device by voice. An easy to use interface for configuring the bot without any knowledge of coding or machine learning is now available on IBM Bluemix and the bot can be built for use in social media, Slack, SMS, on mobile, on websites, on robots.

Commercial information, publishing and IP services company news.

Financial news .

RELX – owner of Elsevier and LexisNexis, announced interim results for 2016 with revenue of £3,257m/€4,169m; and underlying growth of 4%.

Services, Sales

NACE International , a membership organisation in the Corrosion prevention business, and a publisher of Material Performance and CORROSION journals, has engaged Publisher Promotion & Fulfillment (PPF), a division of EBSCO Information Services to provide subscription services on its behalf. PPF will provide subscription management services which include fulfilment, renewals, customer services and reporting.

Digest II - May 2016

183:725743546 (Jane List) — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Month two of the Information Industry Digest (info blog) , and the new developments in commercial information world look just as fascinating as in the first! Following the same format, I’m covering the latest news from the world of commercial information, search, analytics, software and services. Patent, trademark and other IP information, academic, scientific, market, trade and other business data are all included, and are identified based on tracking 40 + information service and search solution providers. The list will be adapted as the blog evolves.

How do I decide what to include? New product introductions, and improvements to existing products, new services, are all included. Each digest will contain sections on content, search technology, post search results review, uses of patent, scientific, commercial information, information and IP services updates. This month I picked up news from information provider user meetings. For whilst there’s no denying the internet is the place for information , and social media is important for reaching and communicating with customers and potentials, we all know that nothing beats face-to-face meetings and discussions.

Content.

Patents. Those working with patent information usually need to search as comprehensively as possible, whether its for prior art, landscaping, invalidity or freedom to operate. Gridlogics have announced fifteen new authorities to their collection. The PatSeer database now contains full-text original language patent data from 42 authorities – these are EP, WO, US, JP, CN, KR, CA, DE, FR, GB, ES, AU, IN, CH, AT, BR, TH , RU, PH, SE, NO, DK , FI, BE, NL, LU, MX, AP, CO, DD, EA, IL, MA, MC, OA, TW, TJ, KG, AM, UZ, MD, GE. The collection also contains machine translations into English for JP, KR, CN, FR, DE, DK, FI, RU, BE, NL, LU. WIPS Global, the Korean patent information provider, currently expanding sales into Western markets, is also adding content, - and now contains full text Indian patent data from 2000, this data set, updated weekly is provided by Molecular Connections .

Academic, scientific, social sciences, research information
Academic literature and the data it creates, is growing in volume , even if not at the speed of patent publications. A study from 2014 showed that global research output doubles every nine years, and in the same year 2,831,406 items of research output were indexed in Scopus.. This data can be used for tracking socio-economic outputs, a topic covered by Elsevier’ s ‘What is research data?’ report. The US National Science Foundation’s latest report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 , used data from Scopus, and Web of Science to gain a full picture. Data on article downloads, article citations, funding bodies, collaborations, and patent citations and applications resulting from the research, were all measured to draw conclusions on research outcomes. CAS introduced ’ MethodsNow TM’ a new approach to finding information needed for chemists in the lab, and is available as an add-on to SciFinder. The new service provides full information on ‘how-to-do’ analytical and synthetic methods, and should be very useful organic and synthetic pharmaceutical chemists and for analytical chemists in any industry. Disclosed procedures can be searched and these include materials, instrumentation, and reaction conditions. The data is sourced from top peer reviewed journals and patents. CAS has created a new index for the Methods to assist with curation and retrieval. The Bibliography of Asian Studies , (BAS) contains nearly 900,000 records of articles published worldwide from 1971, but with Asian content. BAS is produced by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and is now on the EBSCO platform.

Search .

Text mining / text analytics/ NLP
A report comparing text mining / analytics companies was published this month by Forrester. The report compares 20 criteria over ten key companies: Attivo, Cambridge Semantics, Clarabridge, Digital Reasoning, Expert System, HP Enterprise, IBM Watson, Linguamatics, OpenText and SAS. IBM Watson has introduced Tone Analyzer , which facilitates detection of ‘tone’ such as emotion, social and language in text, and other communication modes.

Patent searching
Gridlogic’s Patseer improved it’s find similar patents tool. Enter a patent number using the SIM field which can now be combined with other search criteria for more specificity and to reduce post search filtering.

Citations, searching, analytics and data tracking
Scientific citation tracking: Ex Libris, owned by ProQuest, released a Citation Trail capability as part of its Primo discovery and delivery solution. Primo Central contains a vast quantity of data, organised in individual databases. Citation trial is a forward and backward citation linking tool. Using citations has been recognised as an important method to identify subject-relevant documents (in patents and academic literature), since Eugene Garfield’s Science Citation Index.

Elsevier acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), founded in 1994, it will be added to Mendeley, to enhance both products. Interest in social sciences research is growing with the emerging focus on ‘Internet of Things ‘ and social innovation.

Healthcare citations and text mining
Plum™ Analytics , founded in 2012 is now owned by EBSCO . Plum Analytics has added ‘clinical citations, to its PlumX Suite. Plum is a built on five categories of metrics – Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Clinical Citations. Citations to an actual clinical usage. The clinical citations are gathered by DynaMed Plus , also owned by EBSCO. Doctors can use DynaMed to find evidence-based information when they need it at the ‘point of care’. PlumX text mines DynaMed Plus.

Answers - from NLP to NLU
Google has released SyntaxNet and TensorFlow as open source tools for developers. SyntaxNet a natural language processing (NLP) tool, is one component of TensorFlow. TensorFlow was developed by Google DeepMind, as an open source software library, aiming at NLU or Natural Language Understanding. The toolkit can be used to integrate text with images, photos and videos; it can also provide personalised analytics, suggestions, and answers.

Translation assist
Maybe a pre- or post- search function - Google Translate, is mobile, on Android devices natch. ‘ ‘Tap to Translate’ can translate between 103 languages (the number of languages Google has machine translation software). Google translate is the engine behind the EPO’s patent translate used on espacenet .

Commercial information and IP services company news.

Financial news
Thomson Reuters (TR) published first quarter results, which showed a 4% increase in revenues from Intellectual Property & Science division, this however, because the division is for sale, is counted as ‘Discontinued Operations ‘. TR IP and Science is expected to be sold by the end of 2016.

Services, Sales
The Australian Research Council (ARC) is now using Web of Science ™ to help measure ARC national impact and assess benefits derived from university research. This national assessment exercise (NAE) is new for 2016 as part of the Australian government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda. The NAE will make use of title, topic and author information from Web of Science Core Collection, which contains over 12,000 multi-disciplinary academic journals and over 160,000 conference proceedings. TR promoted its ‘Virtual IP Office’ service , providing outsourcing services such as competitive intelligence, patenting and patentability focused services, IP administration, and IP due diligence tasks for clients.

Licensing information is difficult to find, rules vary on disclosures in different countries, and reporting is often limited, but one industry where M&A and licensing activities show no signs of abating is the pharmaceutical industry. An award promoted by TR IP & Science highlights the leading deals in Biopharmaceutical Licensing and in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A).

User Meetings

Linguamatics hosted their Spring Text Mining Conference in Cambridge at the end of April (#LMSpring16), with an intensive day of talks, sandwiched between hands on workshops. Presenters focussed on text mining of real world data (RWD), which at Novo Nordisk includes patient data, data from clinicians, hospital data, data from those financing patient care and social media. PatientsLikeMe used text mining to gain a deeper understanding of adverse events to prescribed medicines, other talks showcased new uses of text mining, in research based on psychiatric assessment transcripts, and Roche presented a synonym / dictionary build approach to improve text mining of the scientific academic literature. Minesoft held ‘Patent Roadshow’ events around Europe showcasing Chemical Explorer, its new chemistry text mining tool, which can be helpful to find compounds anywhere in a patent document, and not only exemplified compounds, and Citation Tracker.

Events

Past events
RWS attended the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research , in Washington where data analytics was a major theme of the conference, and Awapatent was at Cleantech Capital Day in Malmö, Sweden.

Forthcoming events
Aistemos and PatentSight are attending IPBC in Barcelona in June, and Nigel Swycher CEO of Aistemos will be speaking at the 1st Cambridge Information and Intellectual Property Meeting , UK, in July (co-organised by Extract Information). Aistemos is also hosting its own event ‘IP Strategy in the Board Room’ – a discussion based event reviewing the changing role of IP and IP strategy. Frank Langlotz, of the Swiss Federal Institute’s ip-search, is speaking at PATINFO , Ilmenau in June on Freedom to Operate or infringement search? Synonym or Not?

Digest I - April 2016

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Each month I will be publishing a summary of what’s new in the world of commercial information and search, with a particular focus on all things to do with patent information, search, analysis, software and services.

This is the first monthly digest, bringing together in one place the latest trends in the industry, based on tracking of the major players providing patent information software and services, the major national patent offices, and those providing commercial information and search technologies. Digests will contain sections on content, search technology, post search results review, uses of patent information, and IP service provider updates.

Content enhancements and new content for commercial search

Chemical information and regulatory understanding . CAS / STN’s ChemList now contains details of the 79 substances from the State of Vermont List of Chemicals of High Concern to Children .

The volume of patent applications filed each year has reached over 2.7 million, and they are in a multitude of languages. We rely increasingly on full-text machine translated patent collections to search these documents in a form of English.

STN is bringing improvements to two collections - French patents and Chinese patents. The Chinese (CNFULL) produced by Questel is now created using improved machine translation software. The new software has been in use since 29th June 2015 update, the complete collection back to 1985 will now be re-translated. LexisNexis Univentio, the producer of the FRFULL database on STN is making a different improvement – rescanning French full text documents using enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology improves the quality in the original language and when the documents are machine translated into English. FRFULL contains patents from 1855 onwards.

Academic literature : ProQuest launched nine regional databases containing material published by academic organizations, societies, educational institutions, and academic presses. Collectively the databases cover publications from over 110 countries, 350 university presses and 150 academic associations and societies. The content is multi-disciplinary covering business, humanities, medical, science, technology, engineering, and social sciences.

Popular titles : EBSCO added five well known magazines - Fortune, Life, People, Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine Archives. These journals as well as being of interest to those studying recent history, politics and culture, business, advertising, sports and leisure, this type of resource may also be useful for invalidity searches to show when products were marketed, as well as prior art. Importantly adverts are also included and indexed in the collection.

Search technology

Ambercite has released an improvement to its ‘ Cluster Searching’ tool which filters citations as ‘known’ (patent examiner citations) and 'unknown' (patent examiner citations). This makes it easier to identify prior art, for say, an opposition proceeding. Tracking patent citations just got easier for Minesoft customers. ‘CiteTracker’ has been improved and now provides features for filtering citations according to backward/forward citations, by jurisdiction, examiner category code and assignee. Self-citations can be removed. Analytics functionality has also been added, as has a link to Citation Explorer.

Post search review

Deep reading of chemical information found in full text patents with ‘ PatentPak ’ in STN. PatentPak allows you to find the specific location of chemicals mentioned in patents with interactive links to key substances. PatentPak provides access to more than 9 million patents from 31 patent offices, including: China, European Patent Office, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, United States, World Intellectual Property Organization . Case law post-search visualisation of hits using ‘ Search Term Maps’ from Lexis Nexis also aimed at improving post-search review of documents in the Lexis Advance case law collection. The tool uses colour coding and a location indicator to provide a visual overview of where search words have been found. Groupings of terms, and a review of hits in context to judge relevance.

Patent information usage and IP Service Providers

AWA Patent is now a sponsor at the Uppsala Innovation Centre (UIC), one of Sweden's highly regarded business incubators which has university connections.

On global IP day (April 26th) CPA Global announced new branding for its acquisitions Landon IP and Patrafee who will now operate under CPA Global. Innography, the most recent acquisition will keep its name but will align look and feel towards the new brand.

Aistemos published a new report showing how to compare patenting strategies using Cipher by viewing patent filing patterns of similar companies in a sector.

Ip-search of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property published the annual Swiss biotech report, with a section on patenting of 3d-bioprinting and nanobiotechnology.

Understanding and searching patents written in any language is a major challenge for today’s IP professionals. One company providing solutions - machine translations software provider Ionic Translation Machines grows with four new employees in business development and technical roles.