Digest  XVII    April - May  2018

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.