IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/worpat/v25y2003i4p283-287.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The future of prior art searching at the United States patent and trademark office

Author

Listed:
  • Kazenske, Edward R.

Abstract

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has experienced an increased volume and complexity of patent applications in recent years, with resulting problems in maintaining pendency times and quality. As part of the Office's 21st Century Strategic Plan to deal with this and other problems, the outsourcing of prior art patent searches has been proposed. In this article the author explains the current situation--including the existing partial use of search contractors, briefly surveys some solutions adopted in other patent offices, and then details the outsourcing proposals. It is intended that the contracting out of searches will proceed initially by means of a proof of concept pilot conducted on the search reports prepared by the Office on international applications under the PCT. Contractors will need to be able to demonstrate technical and legal competence, that there is no conflict of interest between these and other searches they carry out, and that they will maintain strict confidentiality. If successful, a wider implementation will be rolled out, with procedures in place to ensure that high quality searches are provided on a continuous basis. Analogous contracting out of classification and reclassification functions is also described.

Suggested Citation

  • Kazenske, Edward R., 2003. "The future of prior art searching at the United States patent and trademark office," World Patent Information, Elsevier, vol. 25(4), pages 283-287, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:worpat:v:25:y:2003:i:4:p:283-287
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172-2190(03)00118-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gaétan de Rassenfosse & Kyle Higham, 2024. "Decentralising the patent system," Chapters, in: Walter G. Park (ed.), Handbook of Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, chapter 8, pages 120-138, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, 2011. "The quality factor in patent systems," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 20(6), pages 1755-1793, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:worpat:v:25:y:2003:i:4:p:283-287. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/654/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.