publication thesis patent

/images/cornell/logo35pt_cornell_white.svg" alt="publication thesis patent"> Cornell University --> Graduate School

Fair use, copyright, patent, and publishing options.

• Is information that you plan to include from others considered “fair use” and are you acknowledging these sources correctly?
• Embargo of online copies
• Creative Commons license
• Has a patent application been filed (or will one be) on the basis of your thesis or dissertation research?
• Register for copyright?
• Supplementary materials
• Make your work discoverable on search engines?
• Make your work accessible to people with visual disabilities

1. Is information that you plan to include from others considered “fair use” and are you acknowledging these sources correctly?

You are responsible for acknowledging any facts, ideas, or materials of others that you include in your work. You must follow the guidelines for acknowledging the work of others in the “Code of Academic Integrity and Acknowledging the Work of Others” (published in the Policy Notebook for the Cornell Community ) .

If you use any copyrighted material in the dissertation or thesis, it is your responsibility to give full credit to the author and publisher of work quoted. The acknowledgment should be placed in a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the paper or chapter. Additionally, you must determine whether use of the material can be classified as a “fair use” by performing an analysis of your use of each copyrighted item. The Cornell Copyright Information Center’s Fair Use Checklist ) is a helpful tool for performing this analysis. (See also, Copyright Law and the Doctoral Dissertation: Guidelines to Your Legal Rights and Responsibilities , published by ProQuest, or The Chicago Manual of Style , published by the University of Chicago Press.)

If your use of material is not considered a “fair use,” you must obtain written permission from the copyright owner. Two copies of each permission letter must be submitted with the dissertation or thesis. ProQuest has specific requirements for the content of the permission letter. For these guidelines, consult the ProQuest Doctoral Dissertation Agreement form (published by ProQuest).

If you have already published or had accepted for publication part of your own dissertation or thesis material in a journal, depending on the terms of your publication agreement, it may be necessary to write to that journal and obtain written authorization to use the material in your dissertation.

2. Embargo of online copies

The value of your dissertation extends well beyond your graduation requirements. It’s important that you make an informed decision about providing online access, via ProQuest and eCommons, to your work. This decision can expand the visibility and impact of your work, but it can also shape the options available to you for publishing subsequent works based on your dissertation.

ProQuest’s ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) database indexes almost all dissertations published in the U.S. and provides subscription access online to the full text of more recent dissertations. ProQuest also sells print copies of dissertations, paying royalties to authors, when they exceed a minimum threshold. Authors retain copyright in the works they submit to ProQuest.

eCommons is a service of the Cornell University Library that provides long-term, online access to Cornell-related content of enduring value. Electronic theses and dissertations deposited in eCommons, unless subject to embargo, are freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. When submitting to eCommons, you retain copyright in your work. Ph.D. dissertations and master’s theses submitted to ProQuest are automatically submitted to eCommons, subject to the same embargo you select for ProQuest.

Electronic copies of dissertations in PQDT or eCommons may be made accessible immediately upon submission or after an embargo period of six months, one year, or two years. You may wish to consider an embargo period which helps address publishers’ interests in being the first to publish scholarly books or articles, while also ensuring that scholarship is accessible to the general public within a reasonable period of time. Your decision should be made in consultation with your special committee.

3. Creative Commons license

Creative Commons licenses provide authors with a straightforward and standardized means of prospectively granting certain permissions to potential users of the author’s material. Authors may request proper attribution, permit copying and the creation of derivative works, request that others share derivative works under the same terms, and allow or disallow commercial uses. Authors may even choose to place their works directly into the public domain. You will have the option of selecting a Creative Commons license when you upload your dissertation or thesis to ProQuest, and your choice will automatically be applied to the copy of your work in eCommons.

4. Has a patent application been filed (or will one be) on the basis of your thesis or dissertation research?

Cornell University Policy 1.5 governs inventions and related property rights. Inventions made by faculty, staff, and students must be disclosed to the Center for Technology Licensing at Cornell University (CTL). Theses and dissertations describing patentable research should be withheld from publication, in order to avoid premature public disclosure.

Use the delayed release (embargo) option if a patent application is or will be in process, noting the reason for the delay as “patent pending.” If you have any questions, please contact Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing at 607-254-4698 or [email protected] .

5. Register for copyright?

Copyright law involves many complex issues that are relevant to you as a graduate student, both in protecting your own work and in referencing the work of others. Discussion of copyright in this publication is not meant to substitute for the legal advice of qualified attorneys. A more detailed discussion of copyright law can be found in the publication from ProQuest entitled Copyright Law and the Doctoral Dissertation: Guidelines to Your Legal Rights and Responsibilities by Kenneth D. Crews.

Copyright protection automatically exists from the time the work is created in fixed form and the copyright immediately becomes the property of the author. Registration with the United States Copyright Office is not required to secure copyright; rather it is a legal formality to place on public record the basic facts of a particular copyright. Although not a condition of copyright protection itself, registering the copyright is ordinarily necessary before any infringement suits can be filed in court.

To register a copyright for your dissertation or thesis, register online or download printable forms . You may also request forms by mail from the Information Section, U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559, or contact them by telephone at 202-707-3000.

Doctoral candidates: You may authorize ProQuest to file, on your behalf, an application for copyright registration. This option will be presented to you as part of the submission process.

6. Supplementary materials

If supplementary materials (audio, video, datasets, etc., up to 2GB per file) are part of your thesis or dissertation, you may submit them as supplementary files during the online submission process. For help selecting long-lived file formats, note ProQuest’s guidance in their document, “Preparing Your Manuscript for Submission (Including Supplemental Files).” File formats for which ProQuest does not guarantee migration may still have a high likelihood of preservation in Cornell’s digital repository; please see the eCommons help page for further guidance.

Do not embed media files in the PDF version of your thesis or dissertation, as this can significantly increase the size of the file and make it difficult to download and access. Include a description of each supplementary file in the abstract of your thesis or dissertation. You may include an additional supplementary file containing more detailed information about the supplementary materials as a “readme” file or other form of documentation; this is particularly advisable for data sets or code. The Research Data Management Service Group ( [email protected] ) offers assistance in preparing and documenting data sets for online distribution.

7. Make your work discoverable on search engines?

ProQuest offers authors the option of making their graduate work discoverable through major search engines including Yahoo, Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books. If you chose the Search Engine option on their dissertation “paper” publishing agreement or within ProQuest’s PROQUEST ETD Administrator (electronic submission service), you can expect to have your work appear in the major search engines.

If you change your mind and do not want your work to be made available through search engines, you can contact customer service at [email protected] or 800-521-0600 ext. 77020. In addition, if you did not initially adopt this option but now want your works made available through this service, contact the customer service group to change your selection.

Please note that search engines index content in eCommons, regardless of the choice you make for ProQuest.

8. Make your work accessible to people with visual disabilities

When creating a PDF version of your thesis or dissertation it is important to keep in mind that readers may use assistive technology such as screen readers to access your document.  Follow best practices to ensure that your thesis or dissertation is accessible to everyone.  These resources may be helpful:

• Cornell CIT’s guidance for creating accessible PDFs
• Checking accessibility using Acrobat Pro
• Embedding alternative text for images in Word
• Save a Word doc as an accessible PDF

Basics of scientific and technical writing: Patents

• Career Feature
• Published: 25 March 2021
• Volume 46 , pages 354–355, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Morteza Monavarian 1  

5211 Accesses

1 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

The basics on patents

A patent is a form of intellectual property (IP) that gives the right to the inventors to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a certain period of time (usually 20 years). The inventors should publish a public disclosure of the invention in return. For the inventors, however, a patent does not automatically give the right to make, use, or sell an invention. Patents are considered private law, which means if someone violates the patent law and uses the idea for commercial purposes during the term of the patent, the inventor can sue them to enforce the law.

Patentability criteria

There are three main criteria to ensure an idea is patentable: novelty, usefulness (or utility), and non-obviousness. The first major criteria of patentability is novelty, which means that the idea is not publicly known before the filing date of the patent or before any priority date of the patent. This is to avoid the patenting of prior ideas. According to the second criteria (utility), an invention needs to be useful to ensure its patentability. Utility here means the invention should provide clear benefits and should be capable of use. This may differ with various countries (e.g., European patent law and US patent law have different rules). Non-obviousness, which is a general requirement of most patent laws, means that the invention or the idea of the invention should be sufficiently beyond or above the current state of the art. For example, if a patent is filed on a method with a certain material, one may not be able to patent the same method with another material if these two materials are known to be used interchangeably.

Types of patents

Different types of patents include utility, design, and plants. Each patent type has its own eligibility requirements and is useful for a certain type of invention. One patent can have more than one suitability. For example, if we need to patent a device and reserve its right for both functionality and design, two separate patents can be filed. Utility applications are the most common and normally cover processes, materials, and devices with functions that are new and useful. Design applications normally cover the shape and configuration of an object (e.g., the exterior shape of a car, cell phone, or laptop). Finally, plant patents are to protect new and distinctive plants.

Applications

A patent application is submitted to a patent office with detailed aspects of the invention described in the specifications along with a set of claims stated in the formal document. Once the specifications are approved, a patent is granted.

A provisional application places an application on file for one year to secure a priority date, but without the complexity and expense of a standard application. After the one-year period, one can file a non-provisional standard patent application, while reserving the priority date of the provisional application. Depending on the outcome of the patent office examination, the patent may be granted. One can also file a continuation application, under certain circumstances, to include materials from an earlier application when the priority year has expired.

A patent filed in the United States is submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an office for international applications. A US patent (from USPTO) does not guarantee international protection of your IP, but, a world patent can cover several countries.

Patent structures

A patent application generally consists of (1) a patent summary, (2) patent specifications, (3) list of claims (independent and dependent), (4) drawings and descriptions, (5) references, and (6) signed Proper IP Disclosure and Declaration forms. The patent summary should provide an overview of the idea and what is to be disclosed in the patent. The main body of the patent specifications should provide details of the background, state-of-the-art features (may also include a summary of prior art search results), and descriptions of the invention, drawings, and figures. Independent claims provide an overview of the invention. Dependent claims provide details and variations of the invention. For a utility application, the claims can be either method- or device-based. Method claims are those that describe novel methods presented in the patent, while device claims are for claiming inventive devices; these claims can be separate. Drawings are in black and white, unlike figures in papers, which tend to vary in color. Other textures or pattern fills, such as shades, diagonal lines, and dashes, can be used in the schematics/figures/drawings, or each section of the figures can be numbered followed by proper descriptions. Similar to papers, patents also contain a reference section to cite prior art (e.g., patents, papers) and relevant works in the specifications. Proper IP Disclosure and Declaration forms should be submitted by each inventor.

Steps to file a patent

The figure shows a standard process flow for a patent, from idea to filing to granting. Assuming an idea is developed, the first step is to secure it. One approach is to write it down on a piece of paper, and sign and date it (this will help when you want to claim an earlier priority date in your application), or save an email sent to your co-inventors or to yourself describing the idea.

The second step is to verify whether the idea is patentable; check its novelty, utility, and non-obviousness. Particularly for novelty, perform a prior art search, including previously published patents, papers, or any other relevant documents.

Then, secure a patent type and write a summary document, which describes the field of invention, description of the prior art, invention specifications, details of the idea with figures and any simulation or experimental data, references, and tentative claims (independent and dependent, method, or device claims). The tentative claims will help the patent office to write proper final claims according to your invention. A good patent application requires illustrative drawings with proper descriptions. Most institutes have illustrators to prepare the drawings, but they will need a base figure and several iterations to achieve a decent, comprehensive drawing for the invention.

The specification document, along with any other supporting documents (e.g., relevant paper publications, thesis), should be sent to the patent office at your institution, along with signed IP disclosure forms, including the patent intellectual contribution shares for each inventor. The inventors should also mention the stage of the idea—whether it is at the concept level or if it has been fully/partially reduced to practice. The inventors should also mention whether the idea is developed or fully/partially reduced-to-practice as a result of any governmental or industrial funding source.

The patent office will conduct a patentability check to determine if it is interested in pursuing the patent. It also check the priority date to ensure there is no significant public disclosure (e.g., publications, presentations, reports). A patent may be rejected if it was disclosed to the public before a provisional or non-provisional patent is filed.

For a provisional application during the one-year period, inventors will have time to further reduce the invention to practice. The patent office will also conduct a systematic search for any industry interest in the invention. After the one-year period for provisional applications, depending on the decision of the institute, they will decide whether to re-file or file for a non-provisional application or to abandon the application. After a non-provisional application is filed, USPTO or WIPO examines the application. Upon approval from another novelty and non-obviousness check with the prior art, a patent with the inventive concepts disclosed is granted and will be approved for public disclosure.

To do or not to do, that is the question

■ Do not pursue a patent for every idea. Select those that have clear industrial applications and can be reduced to practice reasonably quick.

■ Only spend time on ideas that are worth patenting. Conduct a novelty search first.

■ Reduce your invention to practice. Gather any experimental/theoretical data that support the invention.

■ Use proper communication tools when discussing your idea with the patent office. Avoid any immature or false claims that could negatively affect your patent application.

■ Make illustrative but color-independent drawings. Drawings for patents are typically in black and white. They need proper textures/pattern fills and descriptions to replace the color-coding normally used for standard paper figures.

■ Add detailed variations to the idea description, and make drawings that cover all aspects of the invention.

■ Improvise. With patents, details and variations are encouraged, as long as they are within the scope of the invention. The patent office will decide whether to split the idea into separate patents.

■ Enjoy your idea developments!

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Materials Department, and Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA

Morteza Monavarian

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Additional information

This article is the second in a three-part series in MRS Bulletin that will focus on writing papers, patents, and proposals.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Monavarian, M. Basics of scientific and technical writing: Patents. MRS Bulletin 46 , 354–355 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-021-00091-7

Download citation

Published : 25 March 2021

Issue Date : April 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-021-00091-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Technology Transfer

How publications affect patentability.

Academic reputations are established through the publication of research results. However, patent applications can be ruined by the premature publication of a new invention.

One of the conditions for obtaining a patent is that the invention is "new". This means to obtain a US patent that the patent application must be filed within the one-year period following the date of any publication, which then establishes the "Bar" date. Note, however, that all foreign patent rights are lost if the publication precedes the patent application, even by a single day. However, after a US patent application has been filed, international agreement creates a one-year period during which time additional foreign patent application may be filed. In most cases it is strongly advised that the patent application be filed prior to any relevant publication to allow an appropriate determination of whether foreign patent rights will be important. If an invention cannot be patented, it is much less likely to be able to be licensed and earn money. World wide patent rights are critically important for some research areas.

WHAT CONSTITUTES PUBLICATION

An invention counts as published if it forms "part of the state of the art". In US patent law, as in most other countries of the world, the state of the art is defined as "everything made available to even one member of the public anywhere in the world by means of a written or, visually displayed oral description, by use, or in any other way".

EXAMPLES OF Disclosures

• Learned Papers, Journals and Magazines:  These count as published on the first day that an ordinary reader or the general public could obtain a copy. With standard indications of secrecy aided by prominently stamping the article as "Confidential", the process of peer review is generally not considered a public disclosure. Note, however, that many journals are published on the Internet and some are available prior to the publication date. The earliest date when the journal or magazine becomes available to even a single, general reader determines the publication date. Accordingly, the cover date printed on the journal is not the decisive factor.
• Abstracts:   Submission of abstracts in advance of a conference does not constitute public disclosure. However, if the abstracts are sent out to the attendees either via mail or over the Internet, or are available from the registration desk prior to the presentation, the earlier date on which the invention becomes available to the general public becomes the publication date.

Theses:  If the oral examination of the thesis is in public, the thesis counts as published by the fact of the examination. If the oral examination is in private and the thesis is shelved in a library, the thesis is counted as published when a reader could first obtain it, and NOT when the first reader actually read it. Note that the first day that it becomes available may differ from the formal cataloging or accession date. The thesis also counts as published if the supervisor lends it to someone without the borrower knowing that it is to be kept confidential. In many universities, a thesis can be embargoed, but, to be effective, the embargo must have no special exemptions, such as allowing the Emeritus Professors to access these volumes.

• Job Interviews:   Information conveyed during an employment interview or presentation is considered as a public disclosure, even if the participants are asked to hold the information as "confidential".

The Internet:  A message describing an invention on a web site or to a public newsgroup will be considered as published on the day prior to the posting because it becomes available at locations to the East of the International Date Line. Removing a message that had been previously posted does not alter the fact that it has been made available to the public. Even messages made to restricted newsgroups are also considered to be published under the precept that a secret known to a significant proportion of the relevant public has ceased to be a secret.

Poster Displays:  Poster displays count as publication, even if the poster display is outside your lab, in the corridor of the building, or in a central display in the reception area. A university building is a public place and will generally have a variety of visitors.

Exhibitions and Open Days:  Hardware and equipment on show at an exhibition or a visitor's day counts as being published to the extent that a specialist looking at it would understand what they have seen. Concealed characteristics are not considered to be published, unless the hardware or equipment comes into the possession of someone who is freely permitted to dismantle and examine it.

Oral and Casual Disclosures:  Departing from a prepared text at a formal presentation to answer questions is considered a publication of the revealed invention. Remarks at a small-scale seminar and even a conversation around the departmental coffee machine, unless everyone knows what you are saying is to be kept secret, are publications. Generally you are free to discuss your research efforts with other knowledgeable faculty and students, but it does not hurt to remind the participants that your discussions are to be kept secret. But, see the next paragraph.

• Confidential Disclosure to Many People  Even if you follow all the right precautions, a confidential disclosure to too many people may cease to count as confidential. Legal interpretation of the law has taken the common sense view that a secret known to a significant cross-section of those active in a technical field is, in reality, no secret at all.

Realistically, for any of the above situations  to matter, the "other side" usually an infringer seeking to invalidate your patent or a potential licensee trying to avoid royalty payments will have to prove that the thesis was prematurely released, prove when you made your internet posting, prove that your poster display prematurely revealed your invention, prove what you said at the seminar, or whatever undermines your patent. Nevertheless, if serious money is at stake in a patent dispute, the other side will go to great investigative lengths in the hope of discovering some such flaw in your patent prosecution.

GRACE PERIOD

The United States is different from nearly all other countries in that the inventor of the invention may file a patent application within a "grace period" of up to one year after publication. Other "grace period" countries are Japan (only six months and then only if the patent office is notified of the publication at the time of the patent filing), and Canada. A grace period merely removes your own publications from the stock of all literature, which comprises the prior art. It gives you no immunity from the effects of other people's publications or patent applications. Note that for all other countries except for the grace period countries of the USA, Japan and Canada, the patent application must precede any publication of the invention if only by a day or the patent may be ruled invalid. However, once a US patent application has been filed and this filing has preceded any publication of the invention, the inventor has an additional one-year period to file any additional foreign patents.

UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE RESEARCHERS

The importance of keeping innovation and research results confidential may not be obvious to new researchers, who have had limited exposure to the potential value of a patent. It is important that the principle investigator or the senior faculty member take a moment and explain the need for confidentiality to any new researcher, especially if that research may result in valuable intellectual property.

HOW TO KEEP SOMETHING CONFIDENTIAL

To insure that the patent application rights are maintained, the person with whom you intend to discuss your invention must know in advance that your disclosure is meant to be kept confidential. Although confidentiality can be inferred from the circumstances of the disclosure, it is usually much safer to record your mutual rights and obligations through a Confidential Disclosure Agreement, also known as Confidentiality Agreement or Non-Disclosure Agreement, signed in advance by the person who is to receive the confidential information. It is important to be selective in determining with whom you choose to make your confidential disclosure. Although there are legal provisions for protecting your rights if your invention is disclosed against your will, those provisions carry time limits counting from the wrongful disclosure and are not a complete safeguard once the information becomes generally available. Also, it is strongly advised that you not make any disclosure, including even a confidential disclosure, to a potential customer or licensee for the invention until the patent application is filed. The Office of Research can assist you with the preparation of the appropriate agreements to protect your patent rights.

Patent Assistance  

Before publishing the results of any research, the author needs to ask whether the document or disclosure contains any innovation or discovery that could be patented. As explained in this memo, all foreign patent rights are lost and a one-year time limit is established for any US patent rights upon publication. If there is any question or doubt as to the patentability of a new innovation, the researcher is encouraged to complete an Invention Disclosure form, contact the Technology Transfer Office.

The purpose of this memo is to help you understand how a premature publication can undermine the validity of a patent. This note does not contain definitive legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for the advice of your lawyer or patent attorney. For additional information or for answers to specific questions,  please contact the Technology Transfer Office.

The Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thesis release options and patent faqs, what happens to my thesis after the deposit has been completed.

Shortly after each graduation period, the Graduate College transfers the theses of those graduates to IDEALS , the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship. Doctoral students may also choose to have the Graduate College transfer their dissertation to ProQuest Dissertation Publishers. For more information, please carefully review the Release Options page.

Important note for those considering patenting their research:  The best way to protect the patentability of the research disclosed in your thesis is to temporarily withhold publication of the thesis , including the title, abstract, and the body of the work.  This can only be done through a formal thesis withholding process, administered through the Office of Technology Management (OTM).  Neither the IDEALS U of I Access or Closed Access release options nor the ProQuest embargo options are substitutes for contacting OTM and making a formal request that your thesis be withheld from publication to prevent premature disclosure of potentially patentable subject matter:

• Limiting publication to the University community in IDEALS via the U of I Access option is still considered a public disclosure for patenting purposes, which could limit your ability to obtain a patent or greatly narrow the scope of possible patent protection.
• Under both the IDEALS Closed Access option and all ProQuest embargo options, the title and abstract of your thesis will still be publically available.  The information contained in these parts of your thesis is considered a public disclosure for patenting purposes, which could limit your ability to obtain a patent or greatly narrow the scope of possible patent protection.

when will my thesis appear in ideals and proquest?

Your thesis will appear in IDEALS two to four months after degree conferral. If you chose to transfer your thesis to ProQuest, your dissertation will appear in ProQuest four to six months after degree conferral.

When/how do I request that my thesis or dissertation be withheld for patent review?

A student may request to have a thesis or dissertation withheld from public release while patentability is assessed by completing a Thesis Withholding Request Form (PDF) and submitting it to the Office of Technology Management (OTM). The withholding request should be submitted to OTM before the thesis is submitted to the Graduate College. For complete information on the process for submitting a request to withhold a thesis from publication, refer to the Policy for Withholding Graduate Theses from Publication .

OTM will review the student’s request and notify the Graduate College Thesis Office that a thesis is to be withheld. Withholding a thesis for a patent review does not affect graduation or thesis deposit; all students are required to complete their thesis deposit by the deposit deadline .

How does a request for a patent review affect my options for the release of my ETD?

After submitting the Thesis Withholding Request Form (PDF) to OTM, you may create your thesis submission profile and select from one of the three release options offered. Your thesis will be withheld from release into the IDEALS repository until the release is approved by OTM. After the thesis is released into IDEALS, it will become available according to the release option you chose during the thesis submission process.

Can I extend the period of time during which access to my electronic thesis is restricted?

The three IDEALS release options described on the Release Options page will accommodate the needs of most Illinois graduate students. For changes or extensions to your release option, review the request choices on the Release Options page.

Why am I asked to agree to the IDEALS deposit agreement during the thesis submission process?

All students depositing an thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are asked to read and agree to the IDEALS deposit agreement . Basically, your agreement to this non-exclusive license allows IDEALS to make your thesis available according to the release option you choose during thesis submission and to make backup copies of your thesis or to migrate it to future file formats as necessary for preservation purposes. Students retain the copyright to their own work.

Release Option and Patent Resources

The Thesis Office  [email protected]                                                  (217) 333-6278

Release Options

Office of Technology Managemen t

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Building a Business
• Published: 04 March 2020

BUILDING A BUSINESS

Understanding the basics of patenting

• Sadhana Chitale 1 ,
• Colm Lawler 2 &
• Scott Macfarlane 3  

Nature Biotechnology volume  38 ,  pages 263–270 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

7341 Accesses

11 Citations

60 Altmetric

Metrics details

Some practical advice on how to protect research that you are seeking to commercialize.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 12 print issues and online access

195,33 € per year

only 16,28 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Aboy, M. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 37 , 1118–1125 (2019).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Aboy, M., Crespo, C., Liddell, K., Minssen, T. & Liddicoat, J. Nat. Biotechnol. 37 , 513–518 (2019).

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank R. Kadle, partner at Hodgson Russ LLP, for her comments on the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

NYU Langone Health, New York, NY, USA

Sadhana Chitale

Partners Healthcare, Boston, MA, USA

Colm Lawler

SUNY Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, NY, USA

Scott Macfarlane

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sadhana Chitale .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Chitale, S., Lawler, C. & Macfarlane, S. Understanding the basics of patenting. Nat Biotechnol 38 , 263–270 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0447-x

Download citation

Published : 04 March 2020

Issue Date : March 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0447-x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Who counts as an inventor seniority and gender in 430,000 biomedical inventor–researcher teams.

• Anoop Manjunath
• Nathan Kahrobai
• Ishan Kumar

Nature Biotechnology (2023)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

• Publishing Options
• Introduction

Harvard Griffin GSAS strives to provide students with timely, accurate, and clear information. If you need help understanding a specific policy, please contact the office that administers that policy.

• Application for Degree
• Credit for Completed Graduate Work
• Ad Hoc Degree Programs
• Acknowledging the Work of Others
• Advanced Planning
• Dissertation Submission Checklist
• Formatting Your Dissertation
• Submitting Your Dissertation
• English Language Proficiency
• PhD Program Requirements
• Secondary Fields
• Year of Graduate Study (G-Year)
• Master's Degrees
• Grade and Examination Requirements
• Conduct and Safety
• Financial Aid
• Non-Resident Students
• Registration

On this page:

• Distribution of Dissertation

Making Your Dissertation Publicly Available

Licensing agreements, distribution of the dissertation.

Students are given complete control over the accessibility of their work. Upon final approval, the dissertation is distributed based on the permissions and publishing options students select during the ProQuest ETD  submission process.

PhD dissertations are published or otherwise made available for distribution as proof of the candidate’s achievement, echoing a traditional European idea that the candidate for a doctorate must make a contribution to knowledge and cannot have a degree for making a discovery that is kept secret. Because of this, restricting access to dissertations or delaying the release of the work (i.e. “embargoed”) only occurs in very exceptional cases.

Embargoes (Delaying Release)

If necessary, students may request to embargo or delay the release of their work for six months, one year, two years, or more. Embargoes require the approval of the University Librarian and the chair of the student’s academic program; embargo periods over two years require additional support from the student’s director of graduate studies. An embargo period can be selected in the "PQ Publishing Options" section of ProQuest ETD . If students would like to request a delayed release of their dissertation of  longer than 2 years , they will be prompted to upload a signed document  to the “Administrative Documents” section showing the director of graduate study's approval of this request. If students do not have a document when submitting their dissertation they will be asked to have the DGS email the Registrar's Office , acknowledging approval of the delayed-release request.

If approved, the full text of the dissertation is not openly accessible, however, the metadata associated with the work (general information about the dissertation recorded at the time of online submission) and the abstract remain publicly available. Please note:

• Students are responsible for informing their program that their dissertation is embargoed in the event that submission of an additional, departmental print copy of their dissertation is required.
• It is  not  necessary to embargo a dissertation for patenting purposes once a patent application has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. At that point, any invention may be disclosed publicly without a loss of patent rights. (See the  Patents  page for more information).

When submitting work through ProQuest ETD , students are asked to agree to the Harvard Author Agreement, which grants the University a non-exclusive license to preserve, reproduce, and display the work. This license, which is the same the FAS faculty agree to under the  Open Access Policy , does not constrain your rights to subsequently publish your work.

Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

Through ProQuest ETD , dissertations are made available online through the  Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard  (DASH) portal, a central, open-access repository of research by members of the Harvard community. In the Publishing Information section of ProQuest ETD, students must review and accept the Harvard License Agreement to acknowledge distribution of their dissertation through DASH, pursuant to any  embargo  placed on the work in the submission tool.

Deposit to the Harvard Library

Dissertations are added to the Harvard Library catalog, which makes student work discoverable. Some programs also require a bound copy. 

Students are also required to consent to the ProQuest license agreement, and dissertations are automatically added to  ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global . As part of the  license agreement , ProQuest may sell student dissertations; if authors do not want  any  sales of their dissertation, they may permanently embargo it with ProQuest. The agreement further allows ProQuest to distribute copies of the dissertation in microfilm, paper, and digital forms by way of thesis subscription, sales, and indexing services pursuant to any embargo . Finally, the ProQuest publishing agreement is non-exclusive and in no way prohibits the author from making any disposition of other manuscript copies, nor does it prohibit the author from publishing the dissertation at any time. (Please see  ProQuest license and copyright considerations .)

CONTACT INFO

Katie riggs, explore events.

What Evidence Can Demonstrate That A Printed Publication Was Publicly Accessible?

On April 7, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) clarified what evidence can demonstrate that an asserted reference qualifies as a printed publication. This two-section article will first address four decisions designated informative, which shed light on how a petitioner in an IPR might successfully show a reference is a printed publication. Secondly, it will address a fifth decision, designated precedential, that clarified the difference between the burden to show a reference is a printed publication during ex parte examination versus in an inter partes review (IPR).

PART I: Burden to show a prior art printed publication in IPR

The four decisions summarized below provide guidance for Petitioners about the types of evidence of public accessibility the PTAB finds compelling, whereas Patent Owners should note how to challenge such evidence when it is insufficient.

Petitioner unsuccessful:

In Argentum Pharmaceuticals LLC v. Research Corp. Techs., Inc ., IPR2016-00204, Paper 19 (informative), the petitioner was unable to demonstrate that a doctoral thesis from the University of Houston was a printed publication. One argument was that the patent owner had already conceded public accessibility in an unrelated district court case. But the PTAB found it was not sufficient to demonstrate the same in the IPR because the concession was limited to the litigation and not applicable to the IPR. Nor did the PTAB find the petitioner’s assertion that theses from University of Houston are generally publicly available enough. Petitioner argued that citations in academic papers to other University of Houston theses should be enough evidence. But the PTAB disagreed because none of the citations were to the thesis of interest. Denial by the University of the petitioner’s request for information on public access to the thesis was equally unpersuasive to the PTAB.

In In-Depth Geophysical, Inc. v. ConocoPhillips Co., IPR2019-00849, Paper 14 (informative), the petitioner was unable to demonstrate that a conference paper was a prior art printed publication. The petitioner relied upon an entry in the Researchgate website that listed the paper’s title next to a date of “September 2012” – a date more than one year prior to the challenged patent’s November 1, 2013 priority date. However, the petitioner presented no evidence as to what the Researchgate date meant. More damning was that the patent owner provided expert testimony that the paper was presented in a conference in November 2012, and papers were generally not release until the first day of the conference: in this case, November 4, 2012, less than one year before the critical date. Based on this publication date, the reference did not qualify as prior art under AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(b)(1). Even the fact that a European patent examiner had relied upon the same paper in an Office Action of the European equivalent was unpersuasive to the PTAB because of Europe’s absolute novelty provisions, which do not contain a 1-year grace period like the U.S.

Petitioner successful:

In Seabery N. Am. Inc. v. Lincoln Global, Inc ., IPR2016-00840, Paper 11 (informative), the petitioner, like in Argetnum above, relied on a thesis, this time from the University of Bremen, Germany. The petitioner also provided testimony from the author’s thesis advisor that: (1) the University’s rules at the time the thesis was written required the thesis to be deposited at the library; (2) he personally confirmed it was deposited and available for public retrieval; (3) the work was indexed in Germany’s national library system; (4) a reprint of the dissertation bears a copyright and publication date; and (5) excerpts based on the dissertation were published elsewhere. This was sufficient to demonstrate public accessibility for institution.

In Sandoz Inc. v. AbbVie Biotechnology Ltd ., IPR2018-00156, Paper 11 (informative), the petitioner relied on a drug package insert providing evidence from the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine to demonstrate that the package insert was publicly available on the FDA’s website. The petitioner also provided expert testimony that (i) a skilled artisan would know that labels for drugs were available for review on the FDA website, (ii) physicians could and did access that website, and (iii) a skilled artisan could have easily accessed the website and found the specific drug package insert relied on by the petitioner. While the PTAB denied institution on the merits, it did, nonetheless, find the proffered evidence sufficient at institution to show the drug package insert to be a printed publication.

PART II: Burden to show prior art printed publication in ex parte examination is different than that in IPRs

In Ex Parte Grillo-Lopez , Appeal 2018-006082 (precedential), the patent applicant was faced with the same potential prior art that a petitioner presented in IPR proceedings. In the IPR proceedings, the PTAB held that the petitioner did not carry its burden to establish that the publication in question was prior art. In the ex parte prosecution appeal, however, the PTAB held that the patent examiner established prior art status sufficiently to shift the burden to the applicant.

During prosecution, the Examiner had rejected Grillo-Lopez’s patent application, in part, over a transcript of an FDA committee meeting. The Examiner asserted that the transcript was a printed publication by providing (i) publication of the Notice of Hearing of the July 25, 1997 meeting in the Federal Register, (ii) attendance of the hearing by interested members of the public, and (iii) legislation supporting public accessibility of FDA transcripts. Rather than rebut this evidence, Grillo-Lopez instead cited to PTAB decisions in which an IPR petitioner had failed to establish that the same or similar transcripts were printed publications.

In its appeal decision, the PTAB first clarified that burden framework during examination is different from that in an IPR. In a IPR, “at the institution stage, the petition must identify, with particularity, evidence sufficient to establish a reasonable likelihood that the reference was publicly accessible before the critical date of the challenged patent and therefore that there is a reasonable likelihood that it qualifies as a printed publication.” However, as earlier PTAB decisions, held, in ex parte examination, “the examiner met his burden of proof by setting forth the nominal publication date. . . . The Patent and Trademark Office is in no position to establish any thing beyond that. The burden is clearly upon appellants to disprove the prima facie publication date established by the examiner.” Based on this, the PTAB concluded that “the framework set forth [] for IPR proceedings does not apply to [patent] examination.”

It is this difference in burden that allowed the PTAB to find that the Examiner could demonstrate public availability of an FDA transcript that had not been shown to be publicly available in an IPR: “Given the different legal frameworks and burdens for establishing a reference as prior art in IPR proceedings [compared to ex parte patent] examination, the Decision is not contrary to the Board decisions finding that a petitioner failed to meet its burden of showing that the FDA transcript is a printed publication.”

This decision highlights the different between an examiner’s low threshold to meet their burden compared to a higher burden placed on a Petitioner for the same document.

The takeaways here are two-fold. First, patent practitioners should not expect Examiners to meet a high burden to show that a reference is a “printed publication.” Instead, practitioners should be prepared to present compelling rebuttal evidence. Second, post-grant practitioners challenging a patent should evaluate whether a prior art reference, whose status as a “printed publication” is arguable, might be better suited to file a request for ex parte reexamination rather than an IPR/PGR petition.

This article appeared in the April 2020 issue of PTAB Strategies and Insights. To view our past issues, as well as other firm newsletters, please click here .

This article appeared in the October 2022 issue of MarkIt to Market. To view our past issues, as well as other firm newsletters, please click here.

Related Industries

• Electronics & High Tech
• Biotechnology
• Pharmaceuticals
• Chemical & Industrial
• Consumer Products & Services
• Medical Devices & Healthcare

Related Services

• Post-Grant Proceedings
• PTAB Trials: IPRs, PGRs, DERs

Receive insights from the most respected practitioners of IP law, straight to your inbox.

Get insights from the most respected practitioners of IP law

Holds and restrictions on thesis publication

Thesis research should be undertaken in light of MIT’s policy of open research and the free interchange of information. Openness requires that, as a general policy, thesis research should not be undertaken on campus when the results may not be published. From time to time, there may be good reason for delaying the distribution of a thesis to obtain patent protection, or for reasons of privacy or security. To assure that only those theses that meet certain criteria are withheld from distribution, and that they are withheld for the minimum period, the Institute has established specific review procedures.

Written notification of patent holds and other restrictions must reach the Institute Archives before the thesis in question is received, as under normal circumstances, all theses are open and available for public inspection once they have been received by the Institute Archives.

For initial thesis hold requests, students should follow these processes:

• Thesis hold requests should be directed to the Technology Licensing Office (TLO) when related to MIT-initiated patent applications (MIT holds intellectual property rights; patent application process via TLO)
• Student-initiated patents [up to 90-day hold]
• Pursuit of business opportunities [up to 90-day hold]
• Government restrictions [up to 90-day hold]
• Privacy and security [up to 90-day hold]
• Scholarly journal articles pending publication [up to 90-day hold]
• Book publication [up to 24-month hold]

In some circumstances a student may want to request a hold beyond the initial period. Requests for extended thesis holds longer than the initial hold period require the approval of the Vice President for Research . Such requests will be granted given reasonable justifications. Requests should include the appropriate hold time and made for well-justified reasons, including but not limited to the student’s patent applications or other pertinent business opportunities; government restrictions; privacy and security concerns; peer-reviewed publication, and book manuscripts. Students should include a letter of support from their advisor(s) or department head to provide additional context for the request. The Vice President for Research may consult with other entities to determine the advisability and appropriate length of the follow-on hold. The number of such requests and approvals will be provided annually to the Faculty Policy Committee.

Thesis holds related to MIT-initiated patent application

In many circumstances, thesis work may result in  intellectual property  that a student and faculty advisor wish to patent. Thesis research that was supported by Institute funds and/or the use of Institute facilities is, by default, the property of MIT. In this case, technology should be disclosed to MIT’s TLO who will then review the patentability of the work, and file for a US patent if appropriate.  A brief thesis hold allows the student to delay public access to research findings and to prevent premature public disclosures of the work.  Request for a thesis hold must be made jointly by the student and advisor directly to the  MIT Technology Licensing Office  as part of the technology disclosure process.

Specifically, a student who would like to withhold their  thesis from immediate publication while disclosure is being reviewed should refer to the thesis while answering question 6 on the Disclosure Form: “Dates of conception and public disclosure.” The Technology Licensing Office may, if necessary, request a delay in publishing by notifying the Institute Archives, and the thesis will be withheld from distribution for up to one year. If an extension to this original period is required, a request must be made to the  Vice President for Research . If approved, the Vice President for Research will inform the Institute Archives in writing of the extension. The Technology Licensing Office will inform the Institute Archives as soon as the thesis can be released. Additional relevant technology licensing information for students may be found  here .

Thesis holds related to student-initiated patent applications

If it has been determined by MIT’s Technology Licensing Office that a student holds the rights to the  intellectual property  contained in their own thesis, and if the student wishes to pursue other business opportunities related to this work, such as a startup company, a  thesis hold request form  must be submitted to the Vice Chancellor for permission to withhold the thesis from publication.  If granted, the Vice Chancellor’s office will inform the Institute Archives, and the thesis will be withheld from circulation for a period of up to 90 days. If an extension to this original period is required, a request must be made to the  Vice President for Research .

Thesis holds related to other business opportunities

Occasionally a student who holds the rights to the  intellectual property  contained in their own thesis may wish to pursue a business opportunity after graduation, unrelated to any intellectual property that is patentable by MIT. In this case the student may submit a thesis hold request to the Vice Chancellor.

Thesis holds related to government restrictions

The Committee on Graduate Programs recognizes that certain government agencies that sponsor research may require that theses be submitted for security review before they can be placed in the MIT Libraries or published. In the event that the agency does not permit immediate public disclosure of a thesis, this does not preclude its acceptance, but the Vice Chancellor will consider a thesis hold request of up to 90 days. If a longer agency review period is required, the student may ask the  Vice President for Research  for an extension of the hold. A student should not embark on such a thesis without prior approval from the funding agency that the work may be published upon thesis completion.

Thesis holds related to privacy and security

Occasionally, on completing a thesis, a student may feel that its distribution will jeopardize the privacy or safety of the author or other individuals. If the thesis cannot be rewritten to remove the problematic material, the author and advisor should submit the thesis to the director of their graduate program who will prepare a recommendation to the Vice Chancellor in consultation with the Vice President for Research. The Vice Chancellor will advise the Institute Archives in writing of the restricted period. In all cases the restricted period will be kept to a minimum.

Restricted access related to book publication

Any MIT doctoral degree recipient who is attempting to publish a book based wholly or in part on his/her dissertation may request a temporary removal of the thesis from public access on DSpace@MIT for a period of no longer than two years (24 months).

Such a request must be accompanied by documentation that demonstrates that the author’s manuscript cannot be published due to the availability of the related thesis online. The request will be reviewed by the Vice Chancellor. If approved, online access to view and download the thesis will be limited to those with MIT certificate permission.

This site uses cookies to give you the best possible experience. By browsing our website, you agree to our use of cookies.

If you require further information, please visit the Privacy Policy page.

Patent Granted vs Published: Everything You Need to Know

A patent granted vs published depends on where in the patenting process a work lies. Patent applications are published before they are officially granted. 3 min read updated on February 01, 2023

Updated October 16, 2020: 

A patent granted vs published depends on where in the patenting process a work lies. Patent applications are published before they are officially granted.

Published Patents

Published and granted patents look very similar, so they can easily be mistaken. Just because a patent application is published, it won't always be granted. Patent applications are published in order to make the public sphere aware of what is seeking patent protection. This means that, if the patent isn't actually granted to the work, the public can learn from the work anyway.

Basically, published patent applications keep others in the industry up-to-date on what kinds of new improvements and ideas are being worked on. This encourages innovation and moving forward throughout all industries.

Granted Patents

Patents which are granted are protected under law. If you have a granted patent, no other individual or company is legally allowed to benefit from the work in the following ways:

• Manufacturing
• Selling or proposing to sell

Licensed manufacturers of the patented work can create, sell, use, and import the work under the rights given to them by the granted patent and license. Granted patents essentially hand the creators and manufacturers of a protected work a monopoly over that work for a set period of time.

Published patent applications for inventions do not give these rights to the creators of works, but simply say that the works might be protected in the future.

Patent License

If you do have a granted patent on an invention, a manufacturer might want to purchase the rights to create your idea through a patent license , but because the patent has been granted, this can cost the manufacturer lots of money. Sometimes, manufacturers will try to get licensed while the patent is still in the published application phase and not yet granted. This can save them a bit of money.

How the Patent Process Works

Even though it might seem better to have a granted patent versus a published patent application , the application phase can offer some benefits. This can be a discovery process to see how you might need to strengthen or adjust your patent to accurately protect your work. For instance, if the application specifies the size of your invention and another inventor works around that specification to copy without infringement, you now know that the language needs to be changed.

Granted patents cannot be changed or adjusted once they are official, so published patent applications offer some flexibility and room for learning. Once a patent is granted, the creator can file for a continuation to keep the patent in a pending state. At that point, a manufacturer can buy both a license to the granted patent and the pending application and can therefore have more room to experiment and improve the work while still being protected.

Having a published patent application can be a draw to those who might be interested in purchasing a license for your work because it shows that your work has potential. Once the patent is granted, future licensees can know for sure that the work meets all requirements for a patent and your claims of originality and usefulness are warranted. Licensees can take a risk with a patent application, but granted patents are a safer bet.

Published patent applications could possibly be abandoned by their original creators and therefore be worthless, so many licensees are not willing to take that risk.

What Role Does the United States Patent and Trademark Office Play?

Patent applications used to be kept a secret at the USPTO until they were officially approved and issued to the creator. In late 2000, the USPTO began publishing patent applications. This was a part of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) that was an agreement signed by Bill Clinton six years prior, in 1994. This put the United States in the same boat with Japan and Europe which were already publishing patent applications.

Electronic versions of published applications can now be found on the website for the USPTO by searching their online database . This was the biggest change to the patenting system in the United States so far. This has caused a bit of confusion as many still confused published patent applications for granted patents.

If you need help with patent granted versus published, you can post your job on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel accepts only the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.

Hire the top business lawyers and save up to 60% on legal fees

Content Approved by UpCounsel

• Patents and Publications
• Can Someone Patent Your Invention
• Patent Status
• Difference between Patent and Patent Pending
• How Long is a Patent Good For
• Utility Patent Search
• What Is a Publication of Patent Application?
• Patent Application Number vs Publication Number
• When Can You Say Patent Pending? Everything You Need to Know
• Patent Family Size

• Browse All Articles
• Newsletter Sign-Up

• 16 Mar 2023
• Research & Ideas

Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World

Meeting in person can make all the difference for colleagues from different time zones or cultural backgrounds. A study by Prithwiraj Choudhury traces flight patterns among 5,000 airports around the world to show how business travel propels innovation.

• 22 Feb 2022

Lack of Female Scientists Means Fewer Medical Treatments for Women

Women scientists are more likely to develop treatments for women, but many of their ideas never become inventions, research by Rembrand Koning says. What would it take to make innovation more equitable? Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 13 Sep 2021

Science: The Unlikely Frontier for New Business Ideas

Iterative R&D might get products to market quickly, but innovation grounded in scientific research tends to be more valuable, says research by Joshua Lev Krieger and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 07 Jun 2020
• Working Paper Summaries

Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation

Common wisdom holds that VC investment and VC-backed startups are relatively insulated from downturns. This study shows that the relative quantity and quality of innovation declines more for VC-backed firms than for other types of firms during downturns.

• 06 Feb 2020

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

By studying Jeff Bezos' personal patent records, Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg offer a unique glimpse into Amazon's strategy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 28 Dec 2019

Tech Clusters

We are witnessing a major transformation of business to achieve strategic positions in powerful tech hubs, but most workers and consumers will always be far away. The authors describe the spatial concentration of tech activity in the United States and explore the economics of tech clusters with an eye to the future of innovation and economic geography.

• 24 Sep 2019

Do National Security Secrets Hold Back National Innovation?

It's a paradox about innovation. Inventors want to keep secret the inner workings of their most commercial technologies, while technological progress relies on transparency. Daniel Gross looks to the secrets of WW II for insights. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 19 Jun 2019

Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

This study provides robust econometric evidence for how immigrant inventors shape the innovation dynamics of their receiving countries. Countries receiving inventors from other nations that specialize in patenting particular technologies are more likely to have a significant increase in patent applications of the same technology.

• 13 Mar 2019

The Consequences of Invention Secrecy: Evidence from the USPTO Patent Secrecy Program in World War II

Information plays a critical role in technological progress, yet many inventors opt for trade secrecy to protect their intellectual property. This paper studies the myriad repercussions of concealing new inventions through the lens of a systematic and sweeping invention secrecy policy implemented by the USPTO during World War II.

• 04 Sep 2018

Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting

This study details the growth of patenting in software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century, and the continuing dominance of inventors in large US, Japanese, and Korean companies. Researchers still need to understand the impact of such trends on social welfare more generally.

• 11 Jun 2018

Why South Korea's Samsung Built the Only Outdoor Skating Rink in Texas

New research by Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun finds that when some companies are sued, they put their advertising dollars to work in unusual ways to influence local juries. Meet 'TiVo,' the championship steer. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 11 Dec 2017

The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Corporate Finance and Beyond

Corporate finance researchers who analyze patent data are at risk of making highly predictable errors. The problem arises from dramatic changes in the direction and location of technological innovation (and patenting practice) over recent decades. This paper explains the pitfalls and suggests practical steps for avoiding them.

• 28 Feb 2017

Patent Trolls and Small-Business Employment

Patent trolls are organizations that own patents but do not make or use the patented technology directly, instead using their patent portfolios to target firms with patent-infringement claims. This paper provides evidence that state anti-troll laws have had a net positive effect for small firms in high-tech industries. There is no significant effect for larger or non-high-tech firms.

• 17 Jan 2017

Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents

US firms in industries exposed to greater change in import competition from China have suffered worse growth in patenting and R&D spending than firms in industries exposed to less change in Chinese competition.

• 28 Nov 2016

Challenging the Belief that Liability Laws Kill Medical Device Innovation

Many policymakers believe liability laws need reforming so that medical device makers are free to innovate without threat of costly lawsuits. But new research by Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso suggests innovation is not thwarted—just rechanneled. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 18 Nov 2016

Innovation Network

Despite recent advances that measure how the technological development processes in innovative fields link with each other, our understanding of how progress in one technological area links to prior advances in upstream technological fields has been limited. The authors’ analysis and mapping of 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties shows that a stable innovation network acts as a conduit for a cumulative process of technological and scientific progress. Upstream technological developments play an important role in the future pace and direction of patenting in downstream fields. This finding implies that if R&D slackens in one period the effects will still be felt years later in downstream fields.

• 01 Nov 2016

Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting

Technological standards are a central component of the modern network economy. Standard setting organizations (SSOs) play a variety of roles. One of the most important is ensuring the disclosure of relevant intellectual property—in particular, potentially essential patents—prior to the key decisions about a proposed standard. This study finds that large downstream firms are more likely to make generic disclosures to SSOs. Higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed via specific disclosures.

• 26 Sep 2016

Technological Leadership (de)Concentration: Causes in ICTE

The market structure for the Information and Communications Technology equipment industry has undergone enormous changes in the last four decades. This paper characterizes long-term trends by analyzing the concentration in patents from 1976 to 2010 and comparing measured changes against popular assumptions about the size and scale of changes in innovation.

• 19 May 2016
• Research Event

Crowdsourcing, Patent Trolls, and Other Research Insights Highlighted at Harvard Business School Symposium

The 2016 Faculty Research Symposium looked at current and potential collaborations between HBS and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 22 Jan 2016

Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street

Although the past few decades have seen a surge in patents of inventions related to financial services, concerns have been raised about the quality of those patents. New research shows that finance patents in aggregate cite fewer non-patent publications and especially fewer academic publications.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• v.23(2); 2022 Feb 3

Preprint servers and patent prior art

Jacob s sherkow.

1 College of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, Champaign IL, USA

2 Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, Champaign IL, USA

3 Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Denmark

Associated Data

Posting papers on preprint servers creates patent ‘prior art’ and is likely to affect the patentability of any underlying invention.

The use of preprint servers to rapidly disseminate research results has exploded since the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic. But such disclosures may make obtaining patent protection on the results quite difficult. Preprint publications are often “prior art” that render later‐filed patent applications either lacking in novelty or an inventive step both of which are primary requirements under the patent laws. Prior to their dispersion on the Internet, preprints were only considered primary art if they were “available to the public”, which was not always the case for preprints distributed in closely held conferences. Internet preprint servers, however, change that calculus, making any research results available to everyone, everywhere. This tension between Internet preprints and patents may have negative effects on the research enterprise, including encouraging researchers to manufacture a delay in putting their preprints online—a perverse effect of preprint servers’ openness and accessibility. Researchers should therefore be deliberate in their choices about placing preliminary research results on preprint servers and, in particular, should investigate whether patents are necessary to achieve their research’s commercial ends, if any.

Preprint servers and the pandemic

Preprint servers for scientific papers, such as the “rXiv” suite of repositories, like arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, as well as Europe PMC and OSF Preprints, are becoming increasingly popular. bioRxiv, which serves the biomedical research community, has grown from accepting roughly 60 papers per month at its start in 2014 to, as of this writing, roughly 3,000 (rXivist, 2021 ). Aside from serving as repositories and allowing scientists quick dissemination of their results, preprint servers are increasingly popular primary sources of information as well, recording millions of monthly downloads and frequent citations in peer‐reviewed literature. Traditional scientific journals—including this one—have consequently adapted their publication policies to accommodate this shift in science communication and established policies that allow for the posting of papers on preprint servers without preempting publication. Even in the life sciences, a field that continues to venerate legacy publishing platforms, preprint servers have become almost a default option for the expedited release of research results.

Even in the life sciences, a field that continues to venerate legacy publishing platforms, preprint servers have become almost a default option for the expedited release of research results.

All of this has been accelerated with the COVID‐19 pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, when information concerning the nature and transmissibility of the virus was scant and when time was of the essence, researchers recognized that the rapid deposit of even preliminary results had the potential to save lives. As a consequence, preprint servers, and medRxiv in particular, witnessed an explosion in papers both submitted to and downloaded from them (rXivist, 2021 ). These included preliminary studies concerning the development and use of therapeutics to treat COVID‐19, such as hydroxychloroquine, convalescent plasma, and a variety of steroids (Jung et al , 2020 ). While many of these putative treatments did not pan out upon the scrutiny of peer review and larger confirmatory trials, a number of successful COVID‐19 innovations were first disclosed on preprint servers, including rapid CRISPR‐based COVID‐19 testing and antivirals like molnupiravir (preprint: Joung et al , 2020 ; preprint: Painter et al , 2020 ). This sea change in research, innovation, and publication has since spawned an existential body of literature about the future of scientific research and publishing (Callaway, 2020 ).

Preprint servers and patent law

But this gravitation toward announcing innovative research on preprint servers presents several challenges to patent applications claiming such innovations. In particular, disclosures in preprints are likely to be considered “prior art”, references made publicly available prior to the filing of a patent application. These prior art preprints, in turn, may render even innovative patent applications invalid.

… this gravitation toward announcing innovative research on preprint servers presents several challenges to patent applications claiming such innovations.

While patent laws differ from country to country, they are largely harmonized around the world to require patents to be “novel” and possessing an “inventive step” (called “nonobviousness” in the USA). Both of these requirements assess the extent to which an invention has been previously disclosed in the literature. A patent application that claims an invention, which has been previously been disclosed in its entirety, “lacks novelty”, in patent parlance, and a patent office would be compelled to reject it. Similarly, a patent application that claims an invention that, while not identical to one previously described in the field, is only a trivial improvement over it, may lack an inventive step. It, too, would be denied by the patent office. This latter inquiry turns on how the patent application would be viewed by a “person of skill in the art”. The policy behind requiring novelty and inventive step in patents is, ultimately, to protect researchers and the public; to deny exclusionary protection to inventions that have already found their way into the field or would have without a patent.

Surprising to some, this can include an inventor’s own publications. That is, a researcher who publishes an invention first and files for a patent second could have the patent application denied on the grounds that the earlier publication rendered the patent application lacking in novelty or inventive step. In the argot of patent law, the previously published research is “prior art” against the same researcher’s patent application.

That is, a researcher who publishes an invention first and files for a patent second could have the patent application denied…

Using scientists’ own publications against them may be both unfair and unwise; it seems to counsel researchers that the first outlet for their results should be not journals—or preprints—but patent filings. For this reason, some jurisdictions have a “grace period” during which researchers’ prior disclosures are not, legally, “prior art” against their own patent applications. But these grace periods are often short, complex, or not universally available. For countries under the European Patent Convention—which includes the UK despite Brexit—such a grace period is only available in cases where a researcher’s findings have been misappropriated and disclosed by another, or in limited cases regarding “international exhibitions”, and even then, for only six months (Convention on the Grant of European Patents, art 55). The United States’ patent regime is more forgiving; inventors generally have one year to file for their patent applications after initially disclosing their inventions. But not all disclosures count and things gets complicated when researchers collaborate without having signed a written joint research agreement.

Whether a previous disclosure is, in fact, “prior art”, largely turns on whether the research was “available to the public”. Prior to the Internet, this meant whether a reference was available in a library or other open repository, indexed in a manner that make manual searching for it feasible, or presented to a knowledgeable audience without restriction. These were often granular assessments. A doctoral thesis catalogued in a library by author, title, and subject matter counts as prior art; an index of theses in a chemistry department’s shoebox, listing only authors and titles, does not (Manual of Patent Examination Procedure § 2108.01).

The impact of the Internet

Pre‐Internet preprints—often, manuscripts circulated at conferences—already posed challenges to patent applications. Preprints were once lauded as providing evidence that researchers were, in fact, the first to invent something. But just how widely such papers were circulated—and to whom—sometimes became an issue of patentability. One case from the UK Patent Office took pains to distinguish preprints circulated only among conference attendees from those where preprints were distributed to reporters attending a conference (Beavon’s Application, 1978 ). Another from the USA, concluded that a preprint “made available” at a 1994 conference was not publicly available because there was no evidence that it was distributed to attendees without restriction (Corp & v. Cirrix Sys LLC, 2012 ). Yet, other cases turned on whether preprints were circulated with or without restrictions—the analog equivalent to digital disclaimers on PowerPoint slides.

With Internet preprints, very few of these issues matter anymore. The magic, so to speak, of preprint servers like bioRxiv is that they are available to anyone with an Internet connection and without restrictions. In addition, previous concerns with whether papers were properly “indexed” have been obviated by preprint servers’ search boxes, Google, and, of course, that major amplifier of Internet preprints, social media. And even when Internet preprints are pulled from their respective servers, or data otherwise disappears—as happened with some of the original SARS‐CoV‐2 sequence data—Internet archiving services, like the Wayback Machine, often have a copy (Bloom, 2021 ). The Internet does not forget.

The magic, so to speak, of preprint servers like bioRxiv is that they are available to anyone with an internet connection and without restrictions.

This stands to make every publication on a preprint server patent prior art, against not just the researchers themselves but against everyone in the field. Inventors who readily publish their work through preprints will likely have difficulties at patent offices, especially in countries under the European Patent Convention. Such disclosures will almost certainly “anticipate”, that is render not novel, patent applications on the very invention disclosed in the preprint. But even if the resulting invention differs from the research disclosed in the preprint, there are still questions about the inventive step. Further, even if the originally published preprint changes or is revised—as often happens—the old version is still prior art against future improvements. What preprint Internet servers have created—in contrast to their analog, conference‐based cousins—is a vast repository of bleeding‐edge prior art, ready to render many innovations—including of their own makers—unpatentable.

Patents vs. Preprints

This regime of Internet preprints as patent prior art has downsides for science. It encourages researchers to race to file patent applications before anyone else can disclose similar research online (Contreras, 2011 ; Kullman, 2017 ). Such patent races can encourage marginal over “deepening” innovation (Price, 2020 ); create artificial monopolies in the field (Harris & Vickers, 1985 ); and, given the costs of filing patent applications, exacerbate institutional inequalities (Sherkow, 2016 ). Relatedly, the fear of preprints being prior art may simply encourage researchers to delay publishing their own preprints—a truly perverse outcome as the very reason for preprints is to make results quickly and publicly available. While there are types of patent filings, such as provisional applications, that can be put together quickly to stop the prior art clock, even they take time to complete—and longer, in any event, than to draft and submit a preprint to a popular server. And, at the extreme, researchers may intentionally withhold some information from an early version of a preprint in order to preserve such information for patent protection. None of this is optimal.

Were this not complicated enough, the relationship between preprints and patent prior art is made all the worse in informal collaborative research groups. The US patentability grace period can evaporate if some subset of authors publishes preliminary findings before the group as a whole (35 U.S.C. § 102). This can be exacerbated where research is conducted across borders if one country’s rules regarding the identity of listed inventors and author disclosures are more stringent than another’s. This is liable to complicate the research relationship and make publication decisions and authorship—already touchy subjects—a bed of thorns. Such difficulties can, of course, be addressed by formal collaboration and research agreements. But the time, energy, and transaction costs of negotiating such agreements detracts from—if not destroys—the ease and flexibility of preprints. To be clear, many of these issues existed prior to the recent rise in Internet preprints. But the confidentiality and delay that accompanied more traditional publishing processes at least gave researchers slightly more time to smooth over them.

Were this not complicated enough, the relationship between preprints and patent prior art is made all the worse in informal collaborative research groups.

And then, of course, there is the pandemic. Fortunately, preprint servers allowed “great numbers of researchers [to have] quickly shared promising insights about SARS‐CoV‐2 and COVID‐19 notwithstanding the fact that doing so may have been detrimental to their ability to claim intellectual property rights in the future” (Johnson & Bailey, 2020 ). But this does not mean these complexities with preprints and prior art were simply ignored; a variety of pandemic‐related technologies have since been patented, some of which have filing dates that predate their attendant preprints by months. Molnupiravir’s earliest reference on medRxiv dates to December 14, 2020 (preprint: Painter et al , 2020 ); its earliest patent application was filed ten months earlier (U.S. Patent Appl. No. 62/971,559, 2020). In the words of some skeptics of this disconnect: “Even short delays in the dissemination of useful research may translate to many lives lost” (Johnson & Bailey, 2020 ).

Disclosing early (and Often)

What should researchers do to avoid some of the pitfalls regarding patents and preprint servers? It depends, of course, on what’s driving their research—and the answers to a few questions worth carefully considering. What do their research institutions mandate they do, if anything? Some research institutions require their scientists to file inventorship disclosure statements if they believe they have created a patentable invention. Practically, this may make otherwise difficult decisions if not easy, at least simple.

Even if such disclosures are not required, researchers should think about the ultimate end product of their research. Is it a typical medical therapeutic? If so, the classical account of innovation incentives for therapeutics, like drugs and biologics, says that bringing them to market without patent incentives is a troubled endeavor; that may require seeking at least some preliminary patent protection. But this classical account is not necessarily the case and increasing evidence suggests that alternative incentives—such as regulatory and tax incentives—may be enough to bring poorly patented drugs to market (Hemel & Ouellette, 2013 ). By contrast, is the research more basic in nature or related to a simple diagnostic? In such cases, patent protection may be difficult even in the best of conditions. Patenting natural correlations is generally disfavored as being not “susceptible to industrial application” (Europe) or too “abstract” (USA). As a consequence, delaying the submission of a preprint in the hopes of scoring a patent may simply not be worth the effort. And even in cases where researchers have quickly and willingly disclosed valued innovations via preprint, it is not always true they cannot be commercially developed, as was the case with several COVID‐19 diagnostic tests.

And even in cases where researchers have quickly and willingly disclosed valued innovations via preprint, it is not always true they cannot be commercially developed…

Some of this analysis should be the responsibility of research institutions. At present, few institutions have formal policies governing the publication of early results on preprint servers. This can be contrasted with institutional policies concerning the publication of results in open‐access journals. Establishing such policies, especially to align them with inventorship disclosure policies, would both educate researchers on the tensions between patenting and publication and provide a clear framework for where and when researchers can disseminate their results.

Technology is forever changing the ways science is conducted and disseminated. This does not mean that patent law is well positioned to take such changes into consideration. At the same time, the fact remains that preprint deposit of preliminary results is rapidly becoming a standard in many areas of research while patent lawsuits that turn on such disclosures are rare. This may signal researchers' omnipresent worry surrounding disclosures on Internet preprint servers. Or it may signal a more basic urge in the drive to conduct research: to disseminate one’s work as widely and quickly as possible.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Supporting information

Review Process File

EMBO Reports (2022) 23 : e54439. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

• Beavon’s Application (1978) F.S.R. 226 (Patent Off)
• Bloom JD (2021) Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS‐CoV‐2 epidemic . Mol Biol Evol 38 : 5211–5224 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Callaway E (2020) The COVID‐19 crisis could permanently change scientific publishing . Nature 582 : 167–168 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cienna Corp v. Cirrix Sys LLC (2012) WL 946542 (BPAI)
• Contreras JL (2011) Data sharing, latency variables, and science commons . Berkeley Tech Law J 25 : 1601–1672 [ Google Scholar ]
• Harris C, Vickers J (1985) Patent races and the persistence of monopoly . J Ind Econ 33 : 461–481 [ Google Scholar ]
• Hemel DJ, Ouellette LL (2013) Beyond the patents–prizes debate . Texas Law Rev 92 : 303–382 [ Google Scholar ]
• Johnson EE, Bailey TC (2020) Legal lessons from a very fast problem: COVID‐19 . Stanford Law Rev Online 73 : 89–103 [ Google Scholar ]
• Joung J, Ladha A, Saito M, Segel M, Bruneau R, Huang MW, Kim NG, Yu X, Li J, Walker BD et al (2020) Point‐of‐care testing for COVID‐19 using SHERLOCK diagnostics . medRxiv 10.1101/2020.05.04.20091231 [PREPRINT] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jung YE, Sun Y, Schulger NW (2020) Effect and reach of medical articles posted on preprint servers during the COVID‐19 pandemic . JAMA Int Med 181 : 395–397 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kullman DM (2017) Editorial . Brain 140 : 1817 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Painter WP, Holman W, Bush JA, Almazedi F, Malik H, Eraut NCJE, Morin MJ, Szewczyk LJ, Painter GR (2020) Human safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of a novel broad‐spectrum oral antiviral compound, molnupiravir, with activity against SARS‐CoV‐2 . medRxiv . 10.1101/2020.12.10.20235747 [PREPRINT] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Price WN II (2020) The cost of novelty . Columbia Law Rev 120 : 769–834 [ Google Scholar ]
• rXivist (2021) https://rxivist.org/stats [ https://perma.cc/YK5T‐3QKH ] (last accessed 18 Nov 2021)
• Sherkow JS (2016) Pursuit of profit poisons collaboration . Nature 532 : 172–173 [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

An official website of the United States government Here’s how you know keyboard_arrow_down

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Jump to main content

In response to public feedback regarding the retirement of the legacy search systems, a new simplified interface of Patent Public Search named Basic Search is now available. Basic Search is recommended for users new to Patent Public Search, or for users who only need to perform a quick look up.

PatFT, AppFT, PubEAST and PubWEST were retired on September 30. Preexisting links to U.S. patents and pre-grant publications are no longer available. You will need to create new links for saved documents. Read through this  step-by-step guide  on how to set up a web link to access a saved document, as well as set up saved search queries. For questions regarding Patent Public Search, please contact the Public Search Facility at  [email protected] .

Search for patents

New to Patent Searching? See this important information about searching for patents:

How to Conduct a Preliminary U.S. Patent Search: A Step by Step Strategy  - Web Based Tutorial (38 minutes)

The Seven Step Strategy  - Outlines a suggested procedure for patent searching

• A detailed handout of the Seven Step Strategy with examples and screen shots.

Patents may be searched using the following resources:

Patent Public Search

The Patent Public Search tool is a new web-based patent search application that will replace internal legacy search tools PubEast and PubWest and external legacy search tools PatFT and AppFT. Patent Public Search has two user selectable modern interfaces that provide enhanced access to prior art. The new, powerful, and flexible capabilities of the application will improve the overall patent searching process.

Global Dossier

Global Dossier is a set of business services aimed at modernizing the global patent system and delivering benefits to all stakeholders through a single portal/user interface .  Through this secure service, users have access to the file histories of related applications from participating IP Offices, which currently include the IP5 Offices.

By using this service, users can see the patent family for a specific application, containing all related applications filed at participating IP Offices, along with the dossier, classification, and citation data for these applications. This service also provides Office Action Indicators to help users identify applications that contain office actions, a Collections View for saving documents and applications for review later on in the session, and the ability to download the documents in an application.

Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR)

The Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system provides IP customers a safe, simple, and secure way to retrieve and download information regarding patent application status.

Public Search Facility

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Public Search Facility located in Alexandria, VA provides the public access to patent and trademark information in a variety of formats including on-line, microfilm, and print. Trained staff are available to assist public users.

Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs)

Your nearest Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) maintains local search resources and may offer training in patent search techniques.

• Find your nearest PTRC
• 7 Steps to Searching at a PTRC

Patent Official Gazette

The Electronic Official Gazette allows users to browse through the issued patents for the current week. The Official Gazette can be browsed by classification or type of patent, for example, utility, design, and plant.

Common Citation Document (CCD)

The Common Citation Document (CCD) application aims to provide single point access to up-to-date citation data relating to the patent applications of the IP5 Offices. It consolidates the prior art cited by all participating offices for the family members of a patent application, thus enabling the search results for the same invention produced by several offices to be visualized on a single page. The creation of the CCD application is part of an ongoing process of technical harmonization at international level aimed at establishing an appropriate infrastructure to facilitate greater integration of the global patent system.

Search International Patent Offices

To see if your idea has been patented abroad, you'll want to refer to searchable databases made available from other International Intellectual Property offices. Free online access to patent collections is provided by many countries. Some available databases include:

• European Patent Office (EPO) provides esp@cenet a network of Europe's patent databases- This site also provides access to machine translation of European patents for some languages. 
• Japan Patent Office (JPO) - This site also provides access to machine translations of Japanese patents.
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provides PATENTSCOPE ® Search Service, which features a full-text search of published international patent applications and machine translations for some documents as well as a list of international patent databases.
• Korean Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS)
• China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) - This site also provides access to machine translation of Chinese patents.
• Other International Intellectual Property Offices that provide searchable patent databases include: Australia , Canada , Denmark , Finland , France , Germany , Great Britain , India , Israel , Netherlands , Norway , Sweden , Switzerland and Taiwan .

Stopfakes.Gov provides informative Toolkits that give an overview of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) environment in various countries around the world.

For additional search resources, contact your local Patent and Trademark Resource Center , visit the USPTO Public Search Facility or the USPTO Main STIC Library . The staff in the Main STIC Library are experts on foreign patents and able to help the public as needed.

Search Published Sequences

The Publication Site for Issued and Published Sequences (PSIPS) website provides Sequence Listings, tables, and other mega items for granted US patents or published US patent applications.

All sequences (SEQ ID NOs.) and tables for listed patents or publications are available for viewing, without downloading, by accessing the proper document detail page and then submitting a SEQ ID NO or a mega table ID number.

Patent Assignment Search

Visit the Patent Assignment Search website to search for patent assignments and changes in ownership.

Patent Examination Data System (PEDS)

The Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) in the Amazon Cloud provides public users the ability to search, view and download bibliographic data for all publicly available Patent applications in a secure manner. The solution allows public users to search and download bibliographic data in bulk as well as manage the volume of data that can be downloaded at any given period of time by a particular user.

Additional information about this page

Theses & Dissertations

• Submitting your Thesis or Dissertation
• Depositing with ProQuest
• Understanding Copyright
• Understanding Embargoes
• Frequently Asked Questions

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jessica Benner , Library Liaison for Computer Science and GIS, for compiling the information on which this page is based. 

What is an Embargo?

Authors who share their work openly will gain more visibility for their research and are contributing to the scholarly record of work conducted at Carnegie Mellon University. Even so, a n embargo on your work may be appropriate in certain circumstances. An embargo is a specified time period to delay online access . Applying an embargo to your thesis or dissertation does not mean that your work will be completely hidden. A public record of your thesis will exist online, including the author’s name, title of the work, keywords, and an abstract. In either KiltHub or ProQuest, the embargo options can range from 6 months to 5 years, and will automatically expire. In most cases, an embargo is not needed, but you should discuss your options with your thesis advisor.

Embargo Dos and Don'ts

• When to apply an embargo
• When not to apply an embargo

Embargoes are recommended for a few typical cases: 

Non-disclosure agreement, patent agreements or commercially valuable research.

In this case, the authors believe the research is commercially viable and may want to protect intellectual property rights while securing a patent. The embargo period should be used to obtain the patent not for conducting more research.

Publisher Requirements

An embargo is not recommended if: .

• The author wants to do more research or believes the quality of the research is poor. Conducting more research is not an appropriate cause for an embargo.
• The author is against depositing their work in open access venues. They can deposit their dissertation in ProQuest, a subscription based database.
• The author believes everyone else in the department is obtaining embargoes so they want to follow the crowd. Each dissertation is unique and should be evaluated independently.
• << Previous: Understanding Copyright
• Next: Frequently Asked Questions >>
• Last Updated: Mar 19, 2024 11:21 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.cmu.edu/etds

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Machine learning
• Social justice
• Black holes
• Classes and programs

Departments

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Architecture
• Political Science
• Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
• Lincoln Laboratory
• School of Architecture + Planning
• School of Engineering
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Sloan School of Management
• School of Science
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Growing our donated organ supply

Press contact :.

Previous image Next image

For those in need of one, an organ transplant is a matter of life and death. 

Every year, the medical procedure gives thousands of people with advanced or end-stage diseases extended life. This “second chance” is heavily dependent on the availability, compatibility, and proximity of a precious resource that can’t be simply bought, grown, or manufactured — at least not yet.

Instead, organs must be given — cut from one body and implanted into another. And because living organ donation is only viable in certain cases, many organs are only available for donation after the donor’s death.

Unsurprisingly, the logistical and ethical complexity of distributing a limited number of transplant organs to a growing wait list of patients has received much attention. There’s an important part of the process that has received less focus, however, and which may hold significant untapped potential: organ procurement itself.

“If you have a donated organ, who should you give it to? This question has been extensively studied in operations research, economics, and even applied computer science,” says Hammaad Adam , a graduate student in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). “But there’s been a lot less research on where that organ comes from in the first place.”

In the United States, nonprofits called organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, are responsible for finding and evaluating potential donors, interacting with grieving families and hospital administrations, and recovering and delivering organs — all while following the federal laws that serve as both their mandate and guardrails. Recent studies estimate that obstacles and inefficiencies lead to thousands of organs going uncollected every year, even as the demand for transplants continues to grow.

“There’s been little transparent data on organ procurement,” argues Adam. Working with MIT computer science professors Marzyeh Ghassemi and Ashia Wilson , and in collaboration with stakeholders in organ procurement, Adam led a project to create a dataset called ORCHID: Organ Retrieval and Collection of Health Information for Donation . ORCHID contains a decade of clinical, financial, and administrative data from six OPOs.

“Our goal is for the ORCHID database to have an impact in how organ procurement is understood, internally and externally,” says Ghassemi.

Efficiency and equity 

It was looking to make an impact that drew Adam to SES and MIT. With a background in applied math and experience in strategy consulting, solving problems with technical components sits right in his wheelhouse.

“I really missed challenging technical problems from a statistics and machine learning standpoint,” he says of his time in consulting. “So I went back and got a master’s in data science, and over the course of my master’s got involved in a bunch of academic research projects in a few different fields, including biology, management science, and public policy. What I enjoyed most were some of the more social science-focused projects that had immediate impact.”

As a grad student in SES, Adam’s research focuses on using statistical tools to uncover health-care inequities, and developing machine learning approaches to address them. “Part of my dissertation research focuses on building tools that can improve equity in clinical trials and other randomized experiments,” he explains.

One recent example of Adam’s work : developing a novel method to stop clinical trials early if the treatment has an unintended harmful effect for a minority group of participants. “I’ve also been thinking about ways to increase minority representation in clinical trials through improved patient recruitment,” he adds.

Racial inequities in health care extend into organ transplantation, where a majority of wait-listed patients are not white — far in excess of their demographic groups’ proportion to the overall population. There are fewer organ donations from many of these communities, due to various obstacles in need of better understanding if they are to be overcome. 

“My work in organ transplantation began on the allocation side,” explains Adam. “In work under review, we examined the role of race in the acceptance of heart, liver, and lung transplant offers by physicians on behalf of their patients. We found that Black race of the patient was associated with significantly lower odds of organ offer acceptance — in other words, transplant doctors seemed more likely to turn down organs offered to Black patients. This trend may have multiple explanations, but it is nevertheless concerning.”

Adam’s research has also found that donor-candidate race match was associated with significantly higher odds of offer acceptance, an association that Adam says “highlights the importance of organ donation from racial minority communities, and has motivated our work on equitable organ procurement.”

Working with Ghassemi through the IDSS Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism , Adam was introduced to OPO stakeholders looking to collaborate. “It’s this opportunity to impact not only health-care efficiency, but also health-care equity, that really got me interested in this research,” says Adam.

Making an impact

Creating a database like ORCHID means solving problems in multiple domains, from the technical to the political. Some efforts never overcome the first step: getting data in the first place. Thankfully, several OPOs were already seeking collaborations and looking to improve their performance.

“We have been lucky to have a strong partnership with the OPOs, and we hope to work together to find important insights to improve efficiency and equity,” says Ghassemi.

The value of a database like ORCHID is in its potential for generating new insights, especially through quantitative analysis with statistics and computing tools like machine learning. The potential value in ORCHID was recognized with an MIT Prize for Open Data , an MIT Libraries award highlighting the importance and impact of research data that is openly shared.

“It’s nice that the work got some recognition,” says Adam of the prize. “And it was cool to see some of the other great open data work that's happening at MIT. I think there's real impact in releasing publicly available data in an important and understudied domain.”

All the same, Adam knows that building the database is only the first step.

“I'm very interested in understanding the bottlenecks in the organ procurement process,” he explains. “As part of my thesis research, I’m exploring this by modeling OPO decision-making using causal inference and structural econometrics.”

Using insights from this research, Adam also aims to evaluate policy changes that can improve both equity and efficiency in organ procurement. “And we’re hoping to recruit more OPOs, and increase the amount of data we’re releasing,” he says. “The dream state is every OPO joins our collaboration and provides updated data every year.”

Adam is excited to see how other researchers might use the data to address inefficiencies in organ procurement. “Every organ donor saves between three and four lives,” he says. “So every research project that comes out of this dataset could make a real impact.”

Share this news article on:

Related links.

• Hammaad Adam
• MIT Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism
• Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Related Topics

• Graduate, postdoctoral
• Health care
• Computer science and technology
• Health sciences and technology
• Technology and society

Related Articles

Rewarding excellence in open data

How an archeological approach can help leverage biased data in AI to improve medicine

How machine-learning models can amplify inequities in medical diagnosis and treatment

Subtle biases in AI can influence emergency decisions

Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images

Previous item Next item

More MIT News

A biomedical engineer pivots from human movement to women’s health

Read full story →

MIT tops among single-campus universities in US patents granted

A new way to detect radiation involving cheap ceramics

A crossroads for computing at MIT

New AI method captures uncertainty in medical images

Improving drug development with a vast map of the immune system

• More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

• Map (opens in new window)
• Events (opens in new window)
• People (opens in new window)
• Careers (opens in new window)
• Accessibility
• Social Media Hub
• MIT on Facebook
• MIT on YouTube
• MIT on Instagram

The Ohio State University

• BuckeyeLink
• Search Ohio State

Two CBE professors named finalists for 2024 Innovator of the Year awards

At the annual Ohio State University Research and Innovation Showcase , ten finalists were recognized for their research innovations that improve lives. The Ohio State University Innovator of the Year awards celebrate researchers who are actively working to promote the commercialization of university intellectual property through invention disclosures filed, patents applied for and/or received, technologies licensed, or spin-off companies formed.

Two professors from the William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering were named finalists in the competition, Shang-Tian Yang and Eduardo Reategui. The competition has three award levels: Innovator of the Year, Early Career Innovator of the Year, and Next Generation Innovator of the Year (student category).

Innovator of the Year Finalist

Shang-tian yang.