This piece is the first installment of a five-part series called “Why Should Librarians Care about Intellectual Property (IP)?” and focuses on librarians working with patents.

Librarians working with patents

This series of blog posts will give a general overview about four types of IP: librarians working with patents, trademarks, designs, and copyrights. Librarians work daily with all types of intellectual property, often without even realizing it. The equipment used by librarians may be protected by a patent (like card catalog drawers or RFID systems), Vendors that librarians work with hold trademarks on their company and product names (such as OCLC), and librarians are experts at providing patrons access to all types of publications and multimedia while still protecting the copyright of the original authors. Intellectual property is an integral part of information management, so librarians should be familiar with the different types of intellectual property (IP) and how to locate documents related to these different forms of IP.

What are patents?

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) defines a patent as “an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem.” In the United States, patents are granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and the term of a US patent is generally 20 years from the date when the patent application was filed. The USPTO website describes how US patent grants are effective only in the US and US territories, and the patent grants the owner ”the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.”

Most countries around the world have their own intellectual property offices, with different patent laws in each country. An international patent system also exits in the form of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which is overseen by WIPO (an agency of the United Nations). The WIPO website explains that by “filing one international application under the PCT, applicants can simultaneously seek protection for an invention in a very large number of countries.”

Why should librarians care about patents?

Patents may seem to only be of interest to the scientists who develop the inventions and the lawyers who write and enforce the patents, but librarians should also be prepared to research information about patents. For examples of Librarians working with patents:

• Public librarians may be approached by independent inventors or small business owners with questions on how to start the patent application process.
• Corporate librarians may be asked to assist with prior art searches (to determine if technology is already patented or publically available before filing a patent application) or competitive intelligence gathering (to see what types of technology competing firms are developing).
• Federal and academic librarians, especially in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, may be asked to locate patent documents when assisting researchers and students.
• Law librarians may be asked to locate the file histories related to patent applications during the litigation process.

How can I find patents?

If a librarian is asked to locate a patent document, here are a few useful free databases where they can start their search:

• USPTO website: The USPTO website offers a number of free patent search tools, including databases to search full-text US patents and patent applications. The Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) database offers a portal for locating US patent application statuses and many of the documents from US patent file histories.
• EPO website: Espacenet is a database from the European Patent Office (EPO) that allows users to search over 100 million patent documents from around the world. Users can also easily browse the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system through Espacenet.
• WIPO website: The PATENTSCOPE database from WIPO can be used to search 69 million patent documents from around the world, including 3.3 million published PCT applications. Other useful patent search resources from WIPO include a portal for browsing the International Patent Classification (IPC) system and the Patent Register Portal, which provides links to national and regional patent register websites.

Google Patents

• Google Patents can be used to search across about 16 million patent documents from 17 different patenting authorities.

For librarians working with patents, Patent searching can be a complex task, and many concepts like patent families, kind codes, and patent classifications (like the CPC and the IPC systems) should be taken into consideration. It is important to have subject matter experts work with research professional during patent research projects to obtain the best results.

For more information, check out Cadence Group’s Library Management & Research Practice Page.

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