Espacenet
Espacenet(formerly stylized asesp@cenet)[1][2]is a freeonlineservice for searching patents andpatent applications.Espacenet was developed by theEuropean Patent Office(EPO) together with the member states of theEuropean Patent Organisation.Most member states have an Espacenet service in their nationallanguage,and access to the EPO's worldwidedatabase,most of which is in English. In 2022, the Espacenet worldwide service claimed to have records on more than 140 million patent publications.[3]
History
[edit]By launching Espacenet in 1998, the EPO is said to have "revolutionized public access to international patent information, releasing patent data from its paper prisons and changing forever how patents are disseminated, organized, searched, and retrieved."[4]
In 2004, i.e. in the early years of Espacenet, Nancy Lambert considered that, although free, Espacenet, like theUnited States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO) database of US patents, "still tend[ed] to have primitive search engines and in some cases rather cumbersome mechanisms to download patents."[5]She reported it as being deliberate, on the part of the USPTO and EPO, "who have said they do not wish to compete unfairly with commercial vendors".[5]In 2009, Espacenet offered the so-called SmartSearch which allows a query to be composed using a subset ofContextual Query Language(CQL).[6]
In 2012, the EPO launched "Patent Translate", a free online automatic translation service for patents. Created in partnership withGoogle,the translation engine was "specifically built to handle complex and technical patent vocabulary", using "millions of official, human-translated patent documents" to train the translation engine.[7]It covers translations between English and 31 other languages.[8]According to thePatent Information News'magazine published by the EPO, a 2013 independent study compared Espacenet with DepatisNet, Freepatentsonline,Google Patentand the public search facility at theUSPTO.In that study, Espacenet reportedly obtained the highest score for both data coverage and customer support, and the best overall aggregated score.[9]
In March 2016, Espacenet began offeringfull-text searchthrough its collection of English, French and German patent documents.[10]
See also
[edit]- Cooperative Patent Classification
- Global Dossier,a service available via espacenet[11]
- INPADOC
- International Patent Classification
- Patent classification
- Patentscope
- Prior art
References
[edit]- ^esp@cenetis a trademark of the European Patent Organisation (see community trade marks No:001123876,000881896,000881813at EUIPO).
- ^The "@" in esp@cenet – an old friend retiresArchived2 February 2020 at theWayback Machine,Patent Information Newsissue 1/2011, March 2011, p. 5.
- ^"Espacenet patent search".EPO web site.European Patent Office (EPO).Retrieved22 October2022.
Espacenet is accessible to beginners and experts and is updated daily. It contains data on more than 140 million patent documents from around the world.
- ^Michael J. White,"EspacenetEurope's Network of Patent Databases ",Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship (ISSN1092-1206), Number 47, Summer 2006.
- ^abLambert, N. (2004).Internet patent information in the 21st century: A comparison of Delphion, Micropatent, and QPATArchived8 July 2007 at theWayback Machine,2004 International Chemical Information Conference & Exhibition, Annecy, France, 17–20 October 2004, pp 1–2.
- ^"Patentinfo News issue 4 2010"(PDF).Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2 February 2020.Retrieved14 March2013.
- ^"Highlights of 2012, Launch of Patent Translate".European Patent Office. 4 March 2013.Retrieved1 August2014.
- ^"Patent Translate".European Patent Office. 20 December 2013.Retrieved1 August2014.
- ^"Espacenet comes out top in study"(PDF).Patent Information News(2, June 2013). European Patent Office: 2. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 15 July 2021.Retrieved23 June2013.
- ^"Full-text searching in Espacenet"(PDF).Patent Information News(1/2016). European Patent Office: 6. 2016. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 24 May 2019.Retrieved19 March2016.
- ^"Global dossier available in Espacenet".EPO. 24 October 2014. Archived fromthe originalon 14 June 2015.Retrieved13 June2015.