Recent Improvements to National Phase Information Dissemination
August 3, 2006
Significant improvements in the collection and dissemination of information related to Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) national phase entries have recently been made. These improvements are described below.
Extension of the number of countries for which PCT national phase information is available
PatentScope Search Service now provides access, through the "national phase" section available for each PCT international application, to 1,029,388 national phase entry records for the following countries. This important achievement is the result of cooperation between WIPO and several patent offices. It is also the result of a recent information sharing agreement with the European Patent Office (EPO) thanks to which WIPO is now able to incorporate the data from the INPADOC database which includes information from over 10 countries.
Availability of status information and national language translations
PatentScope Search Service also now provides access, through the "national phase" section available for each PCT international application, to status information for 451,619 distinct PCT applications. Thanks to cooperation from the offices of Australia, Canada and the Republic of Korea, Internet hyperlinks are available that direct the user from PATENTSCOPE® to the online databases of those offices where additional status information and national language translations can be found.