A Free Online Portal of Swiss Intellectual Property: Swissreg

I’ll admit, my interest in exploring the online search portals for various intellectual property office websites has gotten a bit out of hand. From Hungary to Singapore, I’ve taken a world tour of the many innovative websites that offer free access to a broad assortment of intellectual property records, ranging from utility patents and industrial designs to trademark and copyright records. This obsession for exploring worldwide IP portals has even created an entire section on Intellogist dedicated to patent authority websites.  I recently visited the free online IP search portal for the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, called Swissreg, which allows users to search through data on Swiss patents, trademarks, designs, SPCs, and even topographies.  This portal offers a variety of fielded search forms for each intellectual property type (except topographies), and users can view bibliographic details and legal status information for each IP record.  Links are also provided for patent results to the full documents accessible on Espacenet.

Continue reading for an overview of the coverage, search, and display options on the Swiss IP search portal Swissreg!

Search Reports, Patent Documents, and File Histories from Brazil through e-Patentes

Professional patent searchers will often need to search for both patent and non-patent literature (NPL) prior art on a global scale during an exhaustive validity search.  Multilingual search capabilities, access to a wide range of both free and subscription patent and NPL databases, and the knowledge and skill to thoroughly search these systems are all necessary components for a successful global prior art search. Patent search provider Landon IP offers the most thorough global prior art searches available, thanks to a team of highly skilled multilingual patent search professionals who can skillfully utilize a range of patent and non-patent literature search systems from around the world.  The in-depth search system information available through Intellogist provides a glimpse into the global prior art search resources which Landon IP searchers utilize on a daily basis.

For example, today we’ll take a quick look at a free resource listed on Intellogist called e-Patentes, which can be used to locate PDF copies of Brazilian patent documents, as well as the search reports and file history papers related to these Brazilian patent records.

Read on to learn about e-Patentes, one of many global patent search resources described on Intellogist!

The Next Google Scholar? Scholrly’s Potential for Locating Non-Patent Literature

Scholrly is a free search engine for academic writing that we first heard about back in the summer of 2012, and the public Beta version of this site was recently released in early January 2013, after six months of private beta testing. The service currently covers the field of computer science, but the creators plan to eventually expand the coverage of the service. Back in 2012, I wondered if Scholrly may one day replace Google Scholar as the easiest free search tool for quickly locating academic writing that may be used as non-patent literature (NPL) prior art by professional patent searchers.  I’ve finally gotten the chance to test the Scholrly search interface, and the hit list and full record views for both article and author results offer some unique data formatted in very useful displays for quickly locating related articles and authors. The quick and advanced search options on Scholrly are very run-of-the-mill, though, and no secondary filtering options are offered in the hit list.

After the jump, learn about the search and display features for the new Scholrly search engine, and see how it measures up to Google Scholar!

Free Online Patent Search Portals: Syria and Saudi Arabia

When conducting patent searches or patent analysis projects that are global in scope, patent search professionals will often need to locate bibliographic or full-text data for patent records from certain issuing authorities that have very limited or zero coverage within the regularly used INPADOC data.  The patent searcher will then need to find alternative methods for locating the patent data, such as accessing the data directly on the patent authority website.

For example, the patenting authorities for Syria (SY) and Saudi Arabia (SA) are not covered by INPADOC (although Saudi Arabia is a member of the GCC, which is covered by INPADOC). Searchers will therefore need to go directly to the issuing authority websites to locate free online patent data for Syria and Saudi Arabia.

After the jump, learn how to access the patent search service on the Syrian Patent Office website and the KACST Patent Search for Saudi Arabia!

Free Family, Citation, and Legal Status Searches for Chinese Patent Documents on PSS of SIPO

In September 2012, I compared the free patent search options available for Chinese patent documents, and one option was the free English patent search interface created by SIPO. SIPO also provides another free patent search tool called the Patent Search and Service System (PSS), which went online for public testing in April 2011 and currently includes both English and Chinese search options.  According to an EPO press release, the PSS includes “a number of advanced search and retrieval possibilities, such as citation and family searches, cross-lingual retrieval, legal status information, full text data and machine translation.”  The tool allows users to access CN data on patents, utility models, and designs from 1985 onwards, and the system is updated monthly. Worldwide patent document data covering 97 countries (most likely INPADOC data) also appears to be searchable under the structured search form. The tool is free, but registration is necessary to access many of the more advanced tools of the system, such as viewing the Search History tab and downloading full PDF documents.  Unfortunately, registration proved to be a bit problematic for an English-language user, and some features were still not accessible even after registering for the portal.

Read on to learn about the advanced search tools accessible for Chinese and worldwide patent documents on PSS, and also learn about the registration and access problems that you may encounter when using this system.

Search Multimedia and Visualize Topics on Science.gov!

Federated search portals are a valuable tool that professional patent searchers can utilize as one source for locating non-patent literature (NPL) prior art, especially government-funded scientific data and literature.  Science.gov is an important example of a government-funded federated search portal, which provides access to over 55 databases and 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information through a single query. Back in 2010, image search made a debut on the Science.gov platform. A recent NewsBreak from Information Today alerted me to the latest changes on the Science.gov federated search portal, which now has multimedia results automatically included in the hit list, the option to visualize topics from the search results, and a Spanish-language version of the portal.

Continue reading to learn about the new features on the Science.gov portal, which may help you locate unique non-patent literature prior art!

Free Chinese Patent Search System Comparison

Over two years ago, the Intellogist Blog discussed Chinese patent searching on a budget. The free search options for Chinese patent documents included in that post were SIPO, CNIPR/C-Pat, CNPAT, Surf IP and IPEXL. We later published a post on the free Chinese patent search options on  Zhihuiya.com. Over the past two years, these websites have all undergone many changes, and some of the search systems are no longer freely available.  Surf IP and C-Pat are no longer available online, and  Zhihuiya.com is now redirected to CN.Patsnap.com, which only appears to be available for subscribed users.  Continue reading to learn about the free Chinese patent search options currently available through the remaining search systems: SIPO, CNIPR, CNPAT, and IPEXL (which draws on SIPO data).  If you need a global prior art search conducted by a professional searcher fluent in Chinese, you can always contact patent search professionals who have access to both free and subscription patent databases with broad Chinese patent coverage.

After the jump, learn about the free Chinese patent search options available through SIPO, CNIPR, CNPAT, and IPEXL!

A Central Search Portal for European Library Materials

Patent searchers  may need to scour the earth for prior art when a case is very important and the traditional channels haven’t turned up the desired results. In these case, the searcher often tries to locate a central portal that searches a wide range of non-patent literature of all publication types and languages.  WorldCat searches the holdings of over 10,000 libraries and can often return an overload of search results that takes hours to sift through.  The Library of Congress (LOC) website allows users to specifically search the library catalogs and digital holding of the LOC, but what if the user wants to search for non-US materials not included in LOC holdings?  Is there a federated search platform dedicated to a non-US region that searches across the holdings of multiple libraries? Yes, there is!

Information Today recently reported on the European Library website, the library aggregator for Europeana (which was “developed in partnership among the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL), the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL)”).   The article describes the broad coverage and useful features of the portal:

The European Library is a new discovery service that provides access to the collections of the national libraries of 46 European countries, plus a growing number of research libraries. Content accessible from the new service includes rare books, manuscripts, images, and video. The service allows users to cross-search 200 million records, covering more than 24 million pages of full-text information and more than 7 million digital objects. Users can export records to reference management services such as Mendeley.

Continue reading to hear about all the search and display features available through European Library, and how you can register for the site for free!

Free Scientific Journals from Latin America on SciELO

Patent searchers can locate a wide variety of international non-patent literature during global prior art searches by using open-access (OA) resources. Both DOAJ and OpenDOAR provide access to international open-access journals and repositories.  Another example of an international OA resource is SciELO, an open-access network of Latin American and Caribbean-based scientific journals.  SciELO provides users free access to Spanish and Portuguese-language journal articles that cover a broad range of scientific topics, and the contents of SciELO can be searched through an English-language interface.

Continue reading to learn the search and viewing options available on SciELO!

My Favorite Open Access Resources: DOAJ

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens are not a few of my favorite things (probably not even in the top 10), but I can say with certainty that one of my favorite things is Open Access (OA), as I’ve illustrated in past blog posts.  These past posts discuss open access resources ranging from university repositories to OA sections of subscription databases. Today I’ll highlight a central directory that allows users to locate thousands of available OA journals, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) .  Patent searchers can utilize this resource to locate obscure prior art from all over the world during comprehensive patent searches, and almost all prior art located through DOAJ is full text and freely accessible.

After the jump, learn about the open access coverage and search options available on DOAJ!