The Lens, formerly called Patent Lens, is an online patent and scholarly literature search facility, provided by Cambia, an

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

-based non-profit organization. The Lens has been hailed as the “most comprehensive scholarly literature database, that exceeds in its width and depth two leading commercial databases ( Web of Science and Scopus) combined”. The Lens is an

agglomeration database Agglomeration may refer to: * Urban agglomeration, in standard English * Megalopolis, in Chinese English, as defined in China's ''Standard for basic terminology of urban planning'' (GB/T 50280—98). Also known as "city cluster". * Economies of agg ...

, that takes bibliometric data from other databases (such as PubMed and Crossref ) and combines them into one, deduplicated and with unified search syntax. Also, unlike the competing databases, The Lens allows data exporting in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

format with a superior granularity compared to

RIS Ris may refer to the following: * Ris, Puy-de-Dôme, a commune in France * Ris, Hautes-Pyrénées, a commune in France * Ris, Norway * Diane Ris (1932–2013), Catholic nun, educator and author * Friedrich Ris (1867–1931), Swiss physician and ento ...

and CSV formats. Launched in 2000 as the Patent Lens, over the years, thanks to grants from the

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...

in 2000–2004, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2012,

The Welcome Trust ''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...

in 2018, as well as from the Lemelson Foundation it added journal articles, conference papers, reports, books and other types of scholarly literature, and evolved into a comprehensive database with over 225+ million scholarly works, 127+ million global patent records, and more than 370 million biological sequences, all with unprecedentedly rich metadata (including citations). In 2013, the Patent Lens was officially replaced with Cambia's new site The Lens.

Features

Searches of the Lens can be undertaken using numerous variables, including full-text, title, abstract, inventor, applicant/assignee, publication number and filing number. A user is also able to search for lapsed, abandoned, or expired US patents via the INPADOC patent status and family information service. Patent families may be visualized using graphical trees as

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

files. The Lens currently links to regulatory data in the form of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ''Orange Book: Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations''. Biological sequence data is integrated via links to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank and the Patent Lens's own gene sequences. The Patent Lens Sequence Project, commenced in June 2006, provides the only public facility to enable users to explore over 80 million DNA and protein sequences disclosed in patents. Patent tutorials are available on the site covering

patent claims In a patent or patent application, the claims define, in technical terms, the extent, i.e. the scope, of the protection conferred by a patent, or the protection sought in a patent application. In other words, the purpose of the claims is to define ...

, freedom to operate, patent inventorship, and continuing patent applications. Plant breeders' rights (PBR), also known as plant variety rights (PVR), are also addressed. This has the intention to "forge a learning resource that participants in innovation systems at all levels... can use to learn of critical and timely issues relevant to improving the public good... by engaging with the patent system".

Native language support

The patent search interface is available in Chinese, English and

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

, with the full text of European Patent Office (EPO) patents being searchable in English, French and German. PCT applications are searchable in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

Technology landscapes

In addition to the patent search engine, the Lens also hosts a number of "technology landscapes". These landscapes analyse volumes of specialized patent, scientific, technical and business data around particular topics into a more navigable form. In the field of health and medicine, landscapes have been created for human genome patenting, the

influenza Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms ...

genome, the human Telomerase gene, molecular markers outside gene sequences, and adjuvants. For agriculture and the environment, landscapes exist to describe the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants, promoters used to regulate gene expression, antibiotic resistance genes and their uses in plant genetic transformation, resistance to Phosphinothricin, positive selection, bioindicators/ambiosensors, and the rice genome. Since 2005 the Patent Lens database has been fully navigable, interactive, and updatable by users.

Endorsement

The landscaping activities of the Patent Lens have been endorsed by Dr. Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in March 2009, in "view of the shared objective of making patent information systems more comprehensive and accessible, and turning raw patent data into useful information resources so as to strengthen the empirical basis of international policy processes". ''Nature Biotechnology'' called the Patent Lens "a giant leap in the right direction" for providing researchers, technology transfer offices and company executives a facile means of establishing the novelty of their offerings and the nature of their competitors' inventions.{{cite journal , doi = 10.1038/nbt0506-474a , title = Patently Transparent , year = 2006 , journal = Nature Biotechnology , volume = 24 , issue = 5 , pages = 474 , pmid=16680110, doi-access = free

References

External links