Professional Workspaces and Toolkits

With this release, we have added an Account Type comparison and pricing page to introduce Professional Workspaces and clarify the different options available to individuals and institutions.

The Lens provides all registered users a Personal Account with a Professional Workspace, providing access to tools and features on the Lens.org platform, and built on open shareable metadata to support many use cases and use-types across industry and the research and innovation sectors. While Institutional Accounts are available as part of Institutional and Enterprise Toolkits, providing access to institution-specific tools and features, as well as Professional Workspaces for all institutional and enterprise users.

As part of the Account Type page, we have created a matrix to explain the different features, tools and use-types available, and to help you select the account that is right for you. Alongside the matrix, we are asking registered users to confirm which category their use of The Lens falls into. There are two use-types:

• Non-commercial use: For students or staff affiliated with a public-good | non-profit institution or using The Lens for non-commercial purposes, and
• Commercial use: For professional users using, or planning to use, The Lens platform or metadata for commercial purposes.

Individual users who use the platform for commercial purposes must have a commercial use license subscription, either through a Professional Workspace | Individual Commercial Use licence or as part of an Institutional | Enterprise Toolkit. This ensures compliance with The Lens Terms of Use and helps to maintain the sustainability of The Lens, with all licensing fees going towards supporting equitable access to open innovation knowledge for everyone.

Individual Commercial Use

Many registered users have asked for an easy and affordable way to license their use of The Lens platform for commercial purposes. In the previous release, we introduced an Individual Commercial Use license subscription and a simple way for registered users to subscribe, permitting commercial use of the platform in their professional work or business.

Tied to the Professional Workspace, the single-seat, non-transferable license allows individuals to use The Lens platform in their work or business, supporting professionals working across the research and innovation sectors. These licenses are part of the Lens Equitable Access Program and contribute to the sustainability of The Lens as community-supported infrastructure, helping ensure The Lens remains a global public resource.

Lens Equitable Access Program

All licensing revenue, whether Individual Commercial Use licenses or Institutional Toolkits, is part of Lens Equitable Access Program (LEAP). The Lens is committed to ensuring equitable access to innovation knowledge for everyone and LEAP is the program that enables this, with licensing fees going towards making The Lens a sustainable, open, public resource, and to ensure universal access to the tools of innovation.

To make The Lens sustainable, we need your support. Under LEAP, we charge a modest fee for professional users, and we waive the fee for all non-profit and public-good users as well as public-good institutions in low and middle income countries, so everyone gets equitable access to these tools and innovation knowledge for collective action.

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 platform to explore new support material, online tutorials and videos to discover all the features Lens.org has to offer and how you can get the most out of these. A new Support Sidebar is also available including all new support content, which can be searched from within the sidebar. Support search 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.

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 this release:

• The summary stats on Lens Profiles now link to the author’s scholarly works and citing patents in a results lists
• Updated ORCID integration to ensure syncing doesn't trigger an "Item deleted" notification from ORCID
• Added Dark Mode theme support to PatCite and Patseq apps
• Added user account and work area details to the sidebar in PatCite
• Switched the web application server to using persistent user sessions
• Added publisher events for PubMed and PMC scholarly works records
• Added "Under Embargo" indicator for scholarly works records that are embargoed in PMC
• Removed redundant download options for Top Hits (document list) charts
• Added "Percentiles" chart type to the custom analysis chart templates
• Added I³ Open Patent Dataset Index to the Lens Labs Apps & Data page

Fixes

• Fix broken COinS on individual patent pages
• Fix grouped bar chart limit not working

API & Data Improvements:

• Scholarly Works: PMC articles that are under embargo are no longer listed as open access if no other source of open access evidence exists.
• Patents: Added missing NPL citations from some US full text documents which have the NPL citations in a different field.

If you would like to help us continue improving the API to provide the services you want, please participate in these brief surveys:

• Patent API and Data Web Services Survey
• Lens Scholar API and Data Web Services Survey
• Lens PatSeq Bulk Data Survey

N.B. For guidance on navigating the 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 or check out the new Lens Support Center & Knowledge Base to see our latest support videos and posts, or contact us at support@lens.org with your queries/comments.

Interested in helping us improve?

• Collective Action needs connected actors. The Collective Action Project provides a number of different activities for all stakeholders to participate in collective problem solving. See how you can participate.
• Interested in volunteering your expertise and time to support The Lens? We welcome expressions of interest, please contact us at support@lens.org. We are happy to learn more about your skill set to see if there is alignment of expertise and timing to contribute to The Lens and support collective action. The Lens lists open volunteer opportunities through VolunteerMatch.
• Contact your librarians and let them know about Lens for Institutions and the Institutional Toolkits.
• Share your use case with us to explore how Lens can help you, or send us your feedback on The Lens features and functionality.
• If you have published using Lens tools or data, or created an application using the API or data from the Lens, please share your work with us so we can share it with others on Lens Labs, and help improve The Lens as a community-supported public resource.

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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