InfoBlog - Mar-Apr  2019

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.