Lens Patents 2.0 is here! With new metadata and functionality, three times as many fields, powerful visualisation and analysis upgrades and an improved user experience.

Lens Patents 2.0

We are pleased to announce the new Lens Patent 2.0 is now live. Following user testing in a preview environment, Lens Patents 2.0 is now available with new metadata and functionality, improved Patent MetaRecord architecture, three times as many fields and powerful analytics.

The new architecture has been designed and constructed from the ground up to implement the Lens MetaRecord concept and accommodate additional patent data sources and valuable patent metadata. Moreover, our legacy custom Lucene search index has been replaced with an Elasticsearch index and MongoDB stack, bringing the technology inline with the scholarly MetaRecord architecture and enabling a range of new functionality previously unavailable in patents, including upgraded powerful patent analytics.

Important Notice: If you have used the preview environment (8.0 Beta version), your saved work area items will NOT be migrated across to the production version of Lens after testing finishes.

Lens Patents 2.0 Features

Improved Patent Data Coverage

Aligned with the Patent API, the upgraded user interface features 120+ fields, three times more than previously available. These include abstracts, claims, and Legal Status, along with the names, countries and addresses of parties (inventors, applicants, agents/attorneys, owners), simple and extended family information, cited non-patent literature, and forward / backward patent citations. With the addition of INPADOC legal events data and improvements to the calculations for US assignments, the coverage of owner/assignee information has also increased by more than 50%.

* Number of patent MetaRecords records with data available for the listed fields.

New Searchable Fields

Of the 120+ searchable patent fields released today, over 80 are new fields with additional granular metadata on parties (inventors, applicants, owners, agents, examiners, geographic location), legal status, families, classifications and much more. A number of existing fields have also been improved and refined and you can now get a description of all fields on the structured search page under the "Fields" tab on the right sidebar. Throughout 2021, we will continue to enrich the platform with additional searchable fields giving you access to the most comprehensive patent metadata available.

Please Note: All legacy fields have been mapped to the equivalent new fields. Any queries saved before Lens version 8.0 that use legacy field names are automatically converted and should give similar results to previous. You can also view converted legacy queries and update them permanently from your work area. View and convert one legacy saved query at a time or automatically convert all saved queries.

New Patent Metadata

Legal Status and Legal Events

The Lens has now ingested the EPO worldwide legal event data (INPADOC) and incorporated it into the patent MetaRecords architecture, providing legal events for 93M patent documents and allowing the calculation and display of Legal Status on over 130M patents. INPADOC legal events replace the Open Patent Services (OPS) legal events on the Legal Info tab of individual patents.

The legal status is displayed on the search results list and on individual patents, and is included in the sidebar filter and analysis chart facets. Clicking on a patents’ legal status will open a pop-up modal which provides a summary of the information used in the Legal Status calculation. The legal status values include:

• Active: Granted patent is in force
• Pending: Application is pending
• Discontinued: Application discontinued, withdrawn or rejected, e.g. discontinuation before grant
• Inactive: Granted patent not in force because of lapse, non-fee payment, etc. The patent hasn't reached the term date and can be revived
• Expired: Patent has reached the term date and is no longer in force
• Patented: PCT applications that have been granted in one or more designated states, or non-PCT granted patents without enough information to calculate the term date
• Unknown: Not enough information to calculate status

Legal status values use a traffic-light style colour coding to indicate the accessibility of the IP rights contained in the patent. For example, green is used to indicate expired and discontinued patents that are no longer in force and therefore available in the public domain, while red is used to indicate active patents that are still in force. This enables a number of new use cases and allows you to do:

• Freedom to operate and prior art searches by searching for issued or pending patents (i.e. active IP rights).
• Search for granted patents by owner, year, jurisdiction, etc. (e.g. search for IBM patents which have been filed from 2001-2010 and have been granted subsequently).
• Find patents that are still in force using the calculated patent status.
• Identify early expiry due to non-payment of fees (i.e.abandoned patents).

Legal Info tab

Please Note: EPO worldwide legal event data (INPADOC) is provided as-is for information only. Legal Status is calculated from available data sources including INPADOC legal events, and may not reflect the latest status. Please see the Patent Legal Status Calculations support post for more information on INPADOC legal events and how we calculate Legal Status.

Party Location

Several improvements have been made to the party metadata associated with Inventors, Applicants Owners, and now Agents and Attorneys, including the extraction of location information. Country and address information is now available for these parties and is displayed on the summary tab of individual patents, with the country flag next to the party name and the address displayed below. Both country and address can be searched through dedicated fields available on the structured search page.

Ownership Reconciliation

Owners are now calculated from both US Assignments and INPADOC legal events, expanding the coverage of owner information to over 50% more patent documents and adding owners from INPADOC legal events for non-US jurisdictions. The coverage of owners calculated from US Assignments has also been extended by improving the conveyance types covered. In a future release we will be adding the partial assignments to further improve the coverage of ownership information. Owners are now displayed on the summary tab in order of earliest recorded date so the latest owner is always shown first.

Agent and Attorney Details

Agent and Attorney information has been extracted from the front page of full text patent documents and is now available for search and filtering, including the name, address and country of the agent / attorney. The agent/attorney information is also displayed on the summary tab of individual patents.

Patent Examiner Details

Examiner information has also been extracted from the front page of full text US patent documents and is now available for searching and visualisations, including the name and department of the primary, assistant and all listed examiners.

Coming soon: Party events

Patent Families

In addition to the simple patent families, the extended patent family members based on INPADOC extended patent family are now provided, along with the ability to group/expand a search by simple or extended family. Simple and extended family member counts are provided in the patent results list and individual patent pages, along with a list of all jurisdictions that are covered by the patent family members.

The Family Info tab has also been updated with a redesigned family timeline and family priorities tables, and options to toggle between simple and extended family. Other family features include the option to sort by simple or extended family id, effectively allowing you to group all family members in the results list together.

Family Info tab

Classifications

Classification information has also been improved in Lens Patents 2.0, with details such as the primary invention codes, additional codes, the generating office and the classification schema version all now displayed on the summary tabs of individual patents. Search is supported on all CPC, IPCR and US classification codes, while search on the invention, first, later and additional classification codes is supported on CPC and IPCR codes.

The classification code descriptions have also been added to tooltips on the classification codes in the summary tab of individual patents. The ability to display the classification descriptions has also been added as an additional chart setting option in heat maps. The CPC and IPC classification schemas in the classification explorer have also been updated to the latest versions (CPC Version 2021.02, IPC Version 2021.01).

Upgraded Patent Search and Analysis

Search Results

• The search results list has been improved, with additional metadata on the results list and individual patent pages, and options to customize the display of the bibliographic data in the results list. These additions and improvements include:
  • Original application number to patent records
  • Simple and extended family counts and ability to sort or group by both
  • Family jurisdictions
  • Legal Status
  • Updated the table view on the results list with customized display options
  • New pills including Legal status, Full text, Owners, Abstract, Claim, Description Sequences, Collections, Cited Works, Notes
• Added a series of summary stats based on the patent search string in the metrics carousel banner on top of the patent search results page. Stats include:
  • Patent Records: The number of patents document records in the result set
  • Simple Families: The number of simple patent families represented in the result set
  • Extended Families: The number of extended patent families represented in the result set
  • Cites Patents: Number of patent documents that cite other patents
  • Cited By Patents: The number of patent documents in the result set that are cited by other patent documents.
  • Patent Citations: Sum of cited by patent count for all cited documents in the result set
  • Cites NPL: Sum of cited by patent count for all cited documents in the result set
  • NPL Citations: The sum of cited NPL count for all patent documents in the result set that cite non-patent literature
  • Resolved NPL Citations: The sum of cites resolved scholarly works count for all patent documents in the result set that cite non-patent literature that have been resolved to a scholarly work Lens Id
• Improved Patent Results breadcrumbs, extended patent family counts are now displayed if the group/expand by extended family filters have been applied
• Improved the display of metadata in the patent table view
• Multi-lingual searching has been improved and results now display metadata in the selected query language where available.
• 10 search languages are now supported. The supported languages are Arabic (AR), English (EN), Chinese (ZH), French (FR), German (DE), Japanese (JA), Korean (KO), Portuguese (PT), Spanish (ES) and Russian (RU).
• The Analysis Preview sidebar will now remain shown/hidden on the results list if the user has changed it’s visibility until the user submits a new search from homepage or structured search which will reset it to shown.

Improved Filters and Facets

• Added additional boolean Flag fields to support advanced filtering options, including:
• Has Title
• Has Abstract
• Has Claim
• Has Description
• Has Full Text
• Has Disclaimer
• Has Legal Events
• Has DOCDB
• Has Applicant
• Has Owner
• Has Inventor
• Has Agent
• Has Examiner
• Has Sequence Listing
• Cited By Patent
• Cites NPL
• Cites Patent
• Cites Resolved NPL
• Added Legal Status filter.
• Added Agents & Attorneys filter with auto suggest.
• Added facet document counts to the Biologicals filter group for species in the current search.

Analysis Charts and Dashboards

With Elasticsearch powering The Lens patent search index, we now have full access to the powerful aggregations and metrics that Elasticsearch supports. This is a drastic leap forward from the patent analytic capabilities previously available in the Lens, bringing the patent analytics inline with scholarly works. Coupled with numerous user experience improvements, it is now even easier than ever to create and share professional patent analysis dashboards. Some of the improvements include:

• Redesigned chart settings panel
• The metric and aggregation settings are now combined into a single dropdown
• Numerous improvements to display of date histograms
• Added new Multi Date Histogram chart type
• Added classification labels to heatmap charts
• New preset charts and dashboards
• Support for legacy patent dashboards
• Added Help section to the chart settings to provide additional guidance on which charts to use in different scenarios
• Added new fields and metrics in the chart facets

Other Lens Patent 2.0 Improvements

• New and improved citation fields and metadata including resolved and unresolved non-patent literature cited, cited patents (backward patent citations), citing patents (forward patent citations) and citation phase. All citation tabs on individual patent pages, (Cited Works, Cited by Patents, Cites Patents) have been consolidated under a single Citations tab.
• Patent offices’ full text records are now incorporated into the patent MetaRecords without requiring a matching DOCDB record if none exists, increasing the coverage and timeliness of new patent filings.
• Added linkouts to USPTO’s Global Dossier and EPO’s Espacenet from individual patent pages.
• Added text match highlighting including highlighting in title plus the text snippet shown in the following order: Claims, Abstract, Description (i.e. any matched terms in the Claims are shown first, followed by matches in the Abstract and Description).
• Updated the Sequences tab design on individual patent pages.
• Improved document preview for patents including updated navigation options on the patent image viewer, zoom functionality and you can now navigate to the first/last page or a specific page number. Also added a gallery view to the sidebar for quickly browsing all document pages.
• Improved the formatting and display of patent full text.
• Improved Exports:
• Added a new JSONL (JSON Lines) export format for patents and scholarly works that uses the same data schema as the API response.
• Field selection if now available for patent exports.
• The Abstract and Claims are now available in the JSON and JSONL patent exports.
• Author Affiliations are now available in the JSON and JSONL scholarly works exports. N.B. JSON uses a legacy data schema that will be deprecated. JSONL uses the same data schema as the API response. We recommended replacing legacy JSON exports with JSON Lines exports.
• Added the ability to add Notes to specific-sections on individual patent documents, which are then displayed inline within the relevant section on the individual patent page.

Other Improvements and Changes

The Lens is a work in progress and with each release, the Lens team improves on certain features or perfects the quality of the data and the service to provide you with the most comprehensive data we can source. While often these changes stem from users' feedback, they also originate from improved data processing and improvements in the source data. In this release, here is the list of other improvements and changes that were implemented:

• Added reference.lens_id to the searchable scholarly works fields, that can be used to find the works that cite one or more scholarly works based on their Lens identifiers.
• Added an Analytics Set flag to the scholarly works filters. The Analytics Set limits results to scholarly works that have useful metadata for visualization and analysis. The criteria for the analytics set are works that have at least a Crossref DOI or PubMed identifier with author information, and are one of the following publication types: journal article, book chapter, conference proceedings, conference proceedings article, book, letter or review. N.B. This criteria is beta and subject to change, we welcome your feedback on the usefulness of this filter.
• Updated the scholarly works search results list view to make it consistent with the patents search results list view.
• Redesigned homepage including a slide-out sidebar filter.
• Added Groupings option to the Institution Country / Region filters Load More modal for easily adding or removing many country filters at once. The initial country groupings include OECD, BRICS, EU, G20 and G7. If you find this functionality useful and would like to request additional groups, please get in touch to let us know.

Support Centre & Knowledge Base^Beta

Introducing the new Lens Support Center & Knowledge Base Currently in Beta, you can access the new support site right from within the Lens app to explore new support material, online tutorials and videos to discover all the features Lens has to offer and how you can get the most out of these. A new Support Sidebar is also available including all the new support content, which can be searched from within the sidebar. Support post results include a pop-out modal that features the support post video if one is available, allowing users to quickly and easily find and view support content right from within the Lens. We are continually adding new support material, videos, tutorials and use cases to help you make the most of the Lens tools and features.

API & Data Improvements:

• Lens Scholarly API^v1.5.2: Added reference.lens_id and in_analytics_set fields to the supported API request fields.
• Lens Patent API^v1.2.7: Added has_examiner, examiner.name and examiner.department to the supported API request fields and added biblio.parties.examiners to the supported response fields. Added language support to API requests for multilingual search.
• Scholarly Works: Added reference.lens_id and analytics_set fields with search and filtering (analytics_set) support in the user interface.

N.B. For guidance on navigating the Scholarly API, please check the online documentation, and to report bugs/issues, usability related questions, or to request features, please use our GitHub issue tracker. For general questions, please visit our Support Center to check out the latest tutorials or contact us at support@lens.org with your queries/comments.

Interested in helping us improve?

• Share your use case with us and explore how Lens can help you.
• Contact your librarians and let them know about Lens Institutional toolkits
• Keep sending us your feedback on The Lens features and functionality.
• If you have published using Lens tools/data, please share your work with us so we can promote it on the Lens labs page.
• Get involved in Lens Labs and take action to improve this public resource by sharing your datasets/algorithms that would enhance data transparency.
• Register your interest in a public webinar on the Lens Reports^BETA and other Lens features.

The Lens is a public good project run by Cambia, a global social enterprise that is committed to making the innovation process more transparent, inclusive and effective for those seeking to solve problems and make a social impact and thus, we welcome your active engagement, participation, and support.

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