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Chemical Literature (Chem 184/284) |
Lecture 8: Types of Primary Literature, Part II
Patents, Technical Reports,Dissertations, and Private Communications
Patents as information sources
Patents are:
- sources of legal information - who owns the right to manufacture a given invention in a given country.
- sources of business information -- competitive intelligence -- What companies are working in a given field? Who are the prime inventors or experts in a field?
- sources of technical information.-they give the necessary information to replicate an invention.
Patents vs. other forms of intellectual property
- Patents cover tangible inventions.
- Copyrights apply to the expression of an idea -- literature, art, music...or software.
- Trademarks and Service Marks cover the recognizable symbols of a company, organization or product.
- Trade secrets are undisclosed inventions; theft is illegal, but...there is nothing to prevent a competitor from "reverse engineering" the product.
What may be patented? (under US law)
- Machines -- includes means of production and consumer goods.
- Manufactures -- mainly consumer goods
- Designs -- e.g. packaging, decoration
- Plants -- agriculture, horticulture
- Processes -- including chemical ones
- Compositions of matter -- i.e. chemical substances This category has also been used to encompass patented genes and genetically modified organisms.
Requirements for patentability
- Novelty - The invention must be "new"; not existing in "prior art".
- Unobviousness -- The invention must not be obvious to an observer "skilled in the art".
- Utility -- The invention must be useful. You can't patent a compound; only a use for a compound.
Disclosure of patent information
The patent application must contain:
- Explanation of the utility of the invention
- Enough detail so that someone "skilled in the art" could reproduce it
- Indication of the "best choice" if more than one alternative is described. (This frequently comes up in chemical and drug patents.)
Components of a U.S. Patent
- For example, see Häberlein, Nies and Scheidl, "Organic Phosphites and Their Use as Stabilizers"
- Bibliographic information
- U.S. patent number -- 4,129,553
This is the patents ID number. They are assigned sequentially starting with the first U.S. patent (issued under George Washington...with Thomas Jefferson as patent examiner...and it was a chemical patent!)
- Publication date -- Dec. 12 1978
This is the key date for patent priority. Until March, 2001, this was the date that the patent was granted. Now, U.S. patents are published upon application.
- Title -- ORGANIC PHOSPHITES AND THEIR USE AS STABILIZERS
Note that patent titles can be very terse and general and need not fully describe the nature of the invention.
- Inventors -- Harald Häberlein, Herbert Nies, Franz Scheidl, all of Gersthofen, Fed. Rep. of Germany
This field gives the name(s) of the inventor(s) and their cities and countries of residence.
- Assignee -- Hoechst Akteingesellschaft, Frankfurt am Mein, Fed. Rep. of Germany
The assignee is the person or corporation to whom the inventors have assigned the patent, that is, the real owner of the patent. City and country information is included.
- Application Number -- 799,277
Application numbers are assigned as patent applications are received. A new cycle of application numbers starts at the beginning of each year.
- Filing date -- May 23, 1977
This is the date that the patent office received the application. Notice that the time lag between filing and issuance is about 18 months. This was the standard prior to 2001.
- International classes -- C07F 9/02; C08K 9/36; C08K 5/10; C08K 5/06
These are classification codes from the World Intellecutal Property Organization (WIPO), used as standardized subject terms for patents. WIPO maintains a list of the IPC codes on their website at http://www.wipo.org/classifications/fulltext/new_ipc/index.htm. In this case, the codes stand for the following:
C07F 9/02 -- Organic chemistry of compounds containing phosphorus
- C08K 9/36 -- Organic additives to polymers containing phosphorus (Note: this code has changed since 1977.)
- CO8K 5/10 -- Organic additives to polymers containing esters
- C08K 5/06 -- Organic additives to polymers containing ethers, acetals, ketals or ortho-esters.
Note that patent classification codes are revised from time to time. This patent would have used the second version of the IPC codes, in effect from July 1, 1974 to the end of 1979. The latest version of the IPC codes is version 8, which went into effect on January 1, 2006.
- U.S. Patent Classifications -- 260/45.84 R, etc.
This is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's own system of classification codes. The first one, listed in boldface, is the primary classification. It offers a guide to the current classification codes at http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/
- Field of Search -- 260/399, etc.
These are the patent classes searched by the patent examiner in an attempt to locate relevant prior art.
- References Cited -- 2,711,401, etc.
These are documents cited by the patent examiner in reviewing the patent application. These may be of interest to a researcher attempting to find more information related to the patent.
- Main Text:
- Abstract -- A short summary of the patent. Frequently, these abstracts are not very detailed or informative.
- Description -- This section gives the background of the invention, and may cite other patents or journal articles. It sets forth the general description of what the patent covers and what makes it distinctive from possible prior art.
- Examples -- This section sets forth specific instances of the invention, generally the best cases.
- Claims -- These are the legal specifics of the invention which the inventor deems novel, useful and inobvious.
- Note that patents are written in a language which may be far different from that which the inventors would use in a journal article about the same topic. It is legal language, designed to conceal as much as to reveal. This is why corporations use specialist patent searchers who can ferret out the nuggets of technical information from the pile of patent language.
Patents on the international level
- Patents are a government monopoly, so an inventor must apply in each country where such a monopoly is desired. Exception: European Patent Office allows application in multiple European countries at once. World International Property Organization (WIPO) streamlines application in multiple countries.
- Different countries have different rules on patentability and time of disclosure. For example, the United States grants patents to the first-to-invent. An inventor has up to a year after the creation of an invention to file, and if they can prove previous invention, can disallow a patent which someone else filed first. Most other countries award patents on a first-to-file basis, and allow no grace period.
- Quick disclosure of unexamined patents (e.g. Japan, current U.S.) vs. disclosure of issued patents only.(traditional U.S.) Nearly all countries now disclose patent applications before granting. Prior to 2001, Japan was frequently the first to publish a patent filed in multiple countries. This is, in part, why Japanese patents are so prevalent in Chemical Abstracts in the latter part of the 20th century.
- Patent laws are converging somewhat, due to the most recent General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT).
Chemical Patents and Markush Structures
Chemical patents often have claims made for a whole family of compounds. These are called Markush claims, after the first inventor to successfully claim a generic structure.
The inventor need not have tested or even prepared all members of the family -- just make a chemically plausible claim of equivalence.
Accessing Patent Information
- Technical reports are an outgrowth of government-funded research.
- In return for funding, the government expects regular progress reports.
- These reports are published through the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) to give the public access to funded research.
- Technical reports can vary dramatically in length, format and level of detail. For example, see DOE/ER12138, Heeger, A. J., " Photo-induced electron transfer from a conducting polymer to buckminsterfullerene: A molecular approach to high efficiency photovoltaic cells. Final report", Published Aug. 13, 1998. Compare it with DOE/ER45331, Israelachvili, Jacob N., "Molecular Properties of Surfaces and Films", Published Nov. 1, 2002.
Why use technical reports?
- They often have information before it appears in journal form -- but they're not peer-reviewed.
- Sometimes they contain data which appears nowhere else. This is especially true of NASA documents.
Accessing Technical Report Data
- NTIS indexes their own technical reports -- the index is available on Web, Search NTIS at http://www.ntis.gov/search/index.aspx; also at NTIS on NISC (1990-present, ucsb.edu only); CD-ROM (1983-1997 at Government Information Center, 1st floor Davidson Library); commercial online sources such as STN and Dialog (1969-present); fiche (1964-present) and in print.
- Some agencies are putting up technical report indexes, or even the reports themselves, on the Web
- Chemical Abstracts indexes technical reports...based on the NTIS indexes, so the indexing is more detailed for chemicals than the original NTIS indexing, but there is more lag time and the indexing is less detailed than that which CA gives to journal articles.
- Technical reports are identified by report number, e.g. AD-A 211653, or DE90-006464. Some reports have more than one report number assigned. The user may have to check the NTIS indexes to verify the report number.
- UCSB owns many technical reports, especially from DOE and NASA. Technical reports on microfiche are located in the Government Information Center. We can obtain others free of charge from the California State Library.
- Dissertations and theses are a major form of academic publication.
- While dissertation writers usually publish much of the contents of their theses elsewhere, or even cobble the thesis together from published articles, they often contain information, especially experimental detail, not reported elsewhere, or reported much later.
Accessing Dissertation Information
- Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI, published by UMI, a division of ProQuest) indexes most North American and many European dissertations, from 1861 to the present.
- UCSB users can access DAI as part of ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
Through this database, UCSB users have free access to electronic copies of dissertations from all University of California campuses from 1997 to the present. Users may also order for a fee, electronic copies of other dissertations from 1997-present or print or microform copies from earlier years. Note: Strangely, dissertations which were submitted in electronic form may not be available as PDF files.
- Note that the PDF copies of dissertations are very large (>1 MB and possibly hundreds of pages)
- Some universities, especially in Europe and Australia, have begun to make available free electronic copies of their dissertations over the Web from local electronic repositories. See, for example, Australasian Digital Theses at http://adt.caul.edu.au/ or the Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations Initiative at http://www.ndltd.org/
- Some dissertations can be obtained from their "home" campus via InterLibrary Loan.
- Similarly to technical reports, Chemical Abstracts gets dissertation info from an outside sourse, DAI, and adds chemical indexing.
Personal Communications - "The Invisible College"
- While, technically speaking, personal communications between researchers may not be publications themselves, they are frequently cited in journal articles and elsewhere.
- Networking between scientists in a given field can be extremely important. This peer-to-peer network is sometimes referred to as the "invisible college" -- the worldwide college without walls that joins researchers in related fields.
- Exchange of paper preprints used to form an important part of the scientific network. Now, researchers are moer likely to distribute electronic copies, or post them on personal websites (when they can get permission from their publishers!)
- Being active in scholarly societies (e.g. ACS) and communicating with your colleagues is vital to stay on top of your field!
This page created by Chuck Huber (huber@library.ucsb.edu).
Updated: 01/05/08 02:22:08