News round-up: exciting patent and non-patent developments

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This week has yielded some interesting discoveries for me as I’ve been combing the industry for Intellogist-worthy news.  My hot list for the week includes national patent office websites, an update on Zotero and the best of World Patent Information!

iPairs

The last two issues of the EPO’s Patent Information News have highlighted iPairs, a new free search portal hosted by the Indian Patent Office.  iPairs began by offering free searching through Indian granted patents and applications as well as legal status checks, and now will offer access to examination reports as well.  As far as I can tell, text searching is available in titles and abstracts only; full specifications can be downloaded for free from the site.

Zotero Everywhere

Zotero has long been known as a cool extension for Firefox which will allow users to create, organize, and annotate a library of digital files and web pages on their own hard drives.  (for more about why Zotero is cool, see the Community Report on Intellogist). Zotero Everywhere is a major initiative by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to develop Zotero extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.  In addition, Zotero will release an improved API that will allow developers to integrate a full range of Zotero features into their own web, mobile, and desktop applications.  We’re excited to see Zotero expand and grow.

National Patent Office Websites

Another discovery from Patent Information News, PANTAS is a Malaysian patent search interface which provides some free searching functionality – detailed search results and specifications may be obtained for a fee.

Venezuelan patents can be searched from Latipat, or apparently from the Venezuelan national patent office search form (I recommend use with Google Translate).

Macau offers a patent search form on the Macao Special Administrative Region Economic Services website.

Expect to see these search sites go up on our global Interactive Coverage Map within the next few days!

The Text, the Full Text and Nothing But the Text

Due to a delivery snafu, my most recent four issues of World Patent Information (the well known Elsevier journal) have finally just arrived.  It’s about time as I was impatiently waiting to read the series on full text patent documents penned by Stephen Adams in the March and June 2010 issues.   Among the issues that impact full text searching, Adams highlights the effects of outdated document drafting practices for patent information, the need for ‘richer’ searchable patent text through more advanced indexing methods, and the current (imperfect) state of the common full text patent collections we do often have access to.   Part 2 ends with a survey of full text collection providers.   I haven’t completely finished absorbing these articles yet as they’re quite meaty – I definitely recommend a look if you’re interested in the state of the industry.

What were the most notable developments that came across your news feed this week?

This post was contributed by Intellogist team member Kristin Whitman.