PCT Yearly Review - WIPO

Section c
development of the pct system
SECTION C
DEVELOPMENT OF THE PCT SYSTEM
C.1
PATENTSCOPE Search System
synonyms into several other languages using special
software developed by WIPO, thus enhancing the scope
of PATENTSCOPE search results.
The PATENTSCOPE search service is the authoritative
source of information on published PCT applications.
This free-of-charge service also provides access to the
national or regional patent collections of a number of
offices worldwide. In 2012 it contained about 19 million
patent documents - among which all published PCT
applications - and offered a wide range of features for
simplifying searches and improving relevancy of results.
C.1.1 PCT licensing feature
Since January 1, 2012, a new feature on PATENTSCOPE
has enabled PCT applicants to indicate their willingness
to license the inventions in their PCT applications.
Applicants’ wishes with regard to licensing are reflected
in PATENTSCOPE in the bibliographic data relating to
a specific application. The licensing availability request
submitted by the applicant is also included as a separate
document under the “Documents” tab in PATENTSCOPE,
and the existence of licensing indications has been added
to the PATENTSCOPE search criteria. In 2012, applicants
used this feature for 167 PCT applications.
C.1.2 New features
Further to the introduction, on July 2, 2012, of a new
third party observation system, a “Submit observation”
link was added in the bibliographic data tab in
PATENTSCOPE (for further information on third party
observations, see C.2.2).
Additional languages have been made available for
multilingual searches. Dutch, Italian and Swedish were
added to WIPO’s Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval
(CLIR) facility, which was already available in Chinese,
English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese,
Russian and Spanish. This tool first finds synonyms for a
search query, and then translates the search query and
A new button labeled “Machine translation” was introduced
in the search result list of PATENTSCOPE. This
button launches Google Translate TM or an alternative
machine translation, such as Microsoft® Translator, if
the language of the search results is different from the
language of the interface. It is also available in the description,
claims and full-text tabs.
Lastly, a question mark was added next to the IPC code
given in the search result list, and by hovering over it,
information related to the IPC code is displayed.
C.1.3 Japan national collection
The national patent collection of Japan has been added to
PATENTSCOPE. It includes about 7.5 million applications
filed at the Japan Patent Office (JPO) since 1993. This
brings to 29 the number of national and regional offices
whose data are available in PATENTSCOPE.
C.1.4 New PCT Backfile products
To complete the collection of PCT data products offered
by WIPO, three new data products were released: the
PCT Backfile Asian Languages containing full-text description
and claims for PCT applications published in
Chinese, Japanese and Korean (1978 to 2011), the PCT
Backfile XML containing PCT applications filed in XML
format in all PCT languages (1978 to 2011) and the PCT
Backfile Bibliographic containing a snapshot in XML of
the PCT bibliographic data contained in PATENTSCOPE.
These are in addition to the PCT Backfile of non-Asian
languages, which contains full-text description and claims
(OCR output) for PCT applications published in English,
French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish,
from 1978 to 2011.
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