With the proliferation of gene patents and the increasing profusion
of biotech patents and licenses with overlapping and competing
rights, the ability to interpret and filter intellectual property (IP) has
never been more important. Last month’s announcement by Australian
startup CAMBIA, and its initiative BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open
Society), of the creation of an open-access patent database collating IP
data from several national patent offices promises to radically improve
that process....
[S]earching for a biotech patent has become an inexplicably
frustrating and convoluted process. There is no streamlined and universal
approach for searching patents filed at the various national and international
patent offices....Worst of all, each patent of interest must be downloaded and printed
one page at a time --even though it might be 100 pages long. The explanation
is not some technical difficulty, or even a lack of funding or
resources. According to the EPO, “this was done as a voluntary restriction
at the request of the commercial [patent search firm] operators.”
In other words, searching and accessing patents has been made difficult
purposely so that patent search firms can more readily charge clients
for searches.
Fortunately, help is now at hand. CAMBIA’s Patent Lens is a
freely accessible IP database that contains 2.5 million patents from
the USPTO, EPO and PCT, together with a powerful search engine. The interface makes
possible searches of the full text of patents from all these patent databases.... It is estimated that underexploitation of technical information
(an estimated 80% of which is published in patent documentation
and nowhere else) costs European industry alone $20 billion each
year—simply because the inability to access relevant patent information
results in duplication of effort or the creation of products that
overlap with prior art.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2006 11:33:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
