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A project to expand the amount of national patent documents which are electronically archived, which commenced in 2013, continued throughout 2015. The aim of the project is to scan all available patent application specification documents from the 1960s to the early 2000s, and to make them available to the public to view on the on our website. It is estimated that there are approximately 58,000 documents to be scanned. This project will facilitate ease of access to the data for both the public and for staff, as well as reducing the requirement for storage space for paper files. The project continued in 2015 with over 24,000 documents scanned to date. It is estimated that the project will take 4 years to complete. As a cost saving measure and to allow continued access to the documents, the Office decided not to outsource this work and is using its own internal staff resources and equipment.
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In relation to improving technological efficiencies, eleven substantive enhancements to the PTOLEMY administration system were developed during the year, all of which . All of these were aimed at improving operational efficiency and ensuring the Office’s core business systems remain current. The Office also migrated its servers to a new off-site infrastructure in 2015, with a more modern operating system.
E-Services
The Irish Patent Office commenced a project to develop e-filing for patents (having introduced e-filing of trade mark applications in 2014 and design e-filing in 2015) and is now currently developing an e-filing system for patents and Supplementary Protection Certificates with . This is hoped to have a go-live date of late 2017.
The Office actively pursues an e-communications programme with the aim of improving service delivery and more efficient processing by combining electronic filing, electronic file processing and electronic communications in a way that will ultimately facilitate the introduction of paperless processing in the Office. The vast majority of Office correspondence is now issued by email and customers are encouraged to correspond by email with the Office, where possible.
In line with Government policy to promote the increased use of electronic payments in the public service and throughout the economy, the Irish Patent Office established two new commercial bank accounts which has improved the fee payment options available to its customers. 99% of the Office’s statutory fees are now paid electronically compared to 96% in 2014. In November 2013, the Office introduced a credit card terminal (CCT) to further facilitate the payment of all fees via telephone. The Office is currently working on the introduction of an E-Services project which will provide for online payment of IP fees.
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In 2015, the Office commenced a “Quality at source” project to ensure standardised patent data information exchange (for inclusion in Espacenet) in compliance with EPO xml formats and WIPO standards. This new project will allow us to firstly, establish a standardised front file delivery of patent data and secondly, collect missing back file patent data from 1973 to date in digital format covering bibliographic, image and full-text data (when the quality of the original document allows it).
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In recent years, the MedTech or medical devices sector in Ireland has been recognised as one of the key drivers for industrial growth for the future. According to Enterprise Ireland, 17 of the world’s top 25 medical technology companies have invested in Ireland and 60% of Med Tech companies are indigenous SMEs. Ireland is now one of Europe’s medical technology “hotspots” and is recognised as a global centre of excellence, employing over 25,000 people in over 100 companies.
Over half of the medical technologies companies based in Ireland now have dedicated R&D facilities, developing new and innovative products and services. Evidence suggests that this change is resulting in more patent filings from Irish resident companies, with Irish inventors conducting their R&D in Ireland.
National full term Patent filings received during 2015 increased sharply by 72% on 2014 (from 118 to 203) while the number of short term patent applications filed also increased by 17% on 2014 (from 203 to 237). After the declines in recent years these increases are encouraging and may in part be indicative of the growth in the economy which patent activity tends to lag behind.
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The PDF documents are then transferred via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to the EPO. This is done on a weekly basis and currently includes a separate ST.36 XML file for the bibliographical and full text abstract data.
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From 2012 the Patents Office Journal became searchable online with full patent document retrieval, and links to Espacenet for EP designating Ireland documents. THE The HTML version was also modified to allow full bibliographic data access and document retrieval.
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Our Office administration software system (PTOLEMY) is used in conjunction with a SQL database for recording file movement, incoming and outgoing correspondence, fee payments, examination reports, etc. Production of office statistics is done with our IMPROMPTU statistics software. Patstat is also available to staff.
The Office ‘workspace’, hosted on Lotus Notes, contains a very large collection of essential information for staff, including: procedure manuals for particular administrative sections; PTOLEMY development and evolution requests; FAQs; etc.
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