Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : July/August 2003

Pre-Grant Publications (PGPs) Now in File 654

Published U.S. patent applications, also known as pre-grant publications (PGPs), are now available in U.S. Patents Fulltext database (File 654). The American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 provided that patent applications are to be published within 18 months of the earliest filing date on or after November 29, 2000. The publication of U.S. patent applications started in March 2001 and all published applications from that date forward are available for online searching in File 654.

PGPs are only available in "electronic" form and are not reported in the USPTO Official Gazette. Every Thursday, published patent applications are made available by the U.S. Patent Office and sent simultaneously to Dialog. On average 5,000 published applications are added each week to File 654.

Records for published applications include the standard bibliographic information, although patent assignees are rarely provided. The complete text and claims for the pending invention are also included. Published applications are assigned annual series numbers and are searched with the PN= prefix (e.g., PN=US 20030002487). The image of the drawing sheet is also available, if it exists, and is sent to Dialog every Friday (one day after the application text is sent) for addition to the patent application records. The design of PGP records is consistent with the granted patent records in File 654, which comprise the majority of records in the database. For the content, search and display details of patent applications and granted patents, review the File 654 Dialog Bluesheet at library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0654.html.

Customers who receive weekly Alerts from File 654 will now receive Alerts for granted patents as well as published applications. This means that each Alert profile will be run twice per week, once when granted patents are updated and once when published applications are added to the database. However, the weekly fixed cost for each profile will remain the same.

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Inventor Search in PGPs

Since U.S. Pre-Grant Publications (PGPs) do not generally list the assignee, it is important to search by inventors. Check previous granted patents held by assignees of interest for inventor names. Then use the same search techniques described for assignees to search inventor names in the author (AU=) field.

Ieva Hartwell,
Intellectual Property Specialist, USA

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