Wednesday, September 30, 2015

About institutions and companies identifiers

Disentangling unique identity for company/institutions entities has always been a hard task when dealing with bibliometrics and patents data .

Some attempts have been done for example by Thomson Reuter in WOS introducing a field named ORGANIZATION ENHANCED where you can search for  a preferred organization name returns all records that contain the preferred name and all records that contain its name variants, based on self reported names variants available in WOS database.

In patstat recently harmonized names from KUL Leuven have been added to person tables, as well many attempts were done in matching ORBIS and patstat names.

Two more datasources that will be made more relevant also because included in ORCID, are

ISNI and RINGGOLD identifiers.

ISNI is an ISO standard, in use by numerous libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management organizations around the world. As an open standard, ISNI is not a proprietary "walled garden" - it is diffused widely on the open web, and is a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

The ISNI is not intended to provide direct access to comprehensive information about a "Public Identity" - instead, it is designed to act as a 'bridge identifier' to link systems where comprehensive information is held, such as Ringgold’s Identify Database.

The latter has been built upon ISNI and adds also other info, like hierarchy, institution data etc.

We named ORCID previously: Users may include employment and education affiliations in their ORCID Records. Affiliations must include an institution's name and address but should also include a unique identifier to disambiguate the institution. Currently, ORCID uses Ringgold organization identifiers to generate a pick-list of organizations.


Monday, September 14, 2015

Seeking for patent license data in EP Register

Recently released EP register for patstat, is a snapshot of the dataset where the European Patent Office stores all the publicly available information it has on European patent applications.

Among other interesting pieces of information, we find also two tables containing data about licensing of patents:

REG111_LICENSEE: Licensee
This table contains information about licensees and rights in rem (R.23 and R.24 EPC).

REG112_LICENSEE_STATES: License state
A license might be valid for all states which are covered by a patent, or only by a subset of these countries. In the latter case this table lists the countries for which the license is valid.

It is not specified how good is the coverage.


Some other information sources state:




Formal requirements for registration of licences

- Application must have been published
- Formal request must be filed by an interested party
- Fee for each application must be paid
- Evidence
   - Copy of any official document or extract thereof or
   - Declaration signed by both parties

- Patent has not already been granted
   - Last date on which a licence may be recorded is the date of  mention of the grant in the 
      European Patent Bulletin (J 17/91, OJ EPO 1994, 225)
   - After grant, responsibility for registration of licences is transferred to the national offices.

What is in detail an evidence:

Signature of the parties
European patent application number concerned
Contracting states for which the licence applies
Any language (Rule 3(1)EPC), but EPO may require a translation into one of its official languages.

Exclusive licence and sub-licence Rule 24 EPC

A licence is recorded as an exclusive licence if both licensor and licensee agree to the indication being shown in the Register (Rule 24(1)EPC)

A licence is recorded as a sub-licence if it is granted by a licensee whose licence is recorded in the Register  (Rule 24(2)EPC)

In sintesys a license is mentioned in register if:

- Formal request is filed
- Evidence signed by both parties
- The fee is paid