Espacenet: free access to over 100 million patent documents
Access to Global Dossier and links to the European Patent Register and national registers
The Espacenet interface displays Global Dossier icons and links to registers for certain authorities providing access to the Global Dossier and to register information, respectively. In order to avoid any ambiguity, access to Global Dossier and links to the registers have been separated. When you click on a Global Dossier icon, the behaviour is the same as in the European Patent Register. For links to a national register, the respective national (or EP) register window will open where links/pages are available. For authorities/documents where no link to a register is available, no link will be displayed. The Global Dossier link, when available, is displayed in the content area of the bibliographic view and in the INPADOC family view.
The Global Dossier service has now been extended to encompass further authorities participating in the WIPO CASE initiative. In addition to patent application dossiers, ("file wrappers") from the world's five largest patent offices, it now also includes public dossiers from the Canadian Patent Office as well as PCT applications. The bibliographic and full text-coverage tables have been improved to indicate changes in coverage. Result list sorting by publication date is now available.
For more details, please see the release notes
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Espacenet patent search
Espacenet is accessible to beginners and experts and is updated daily. It contains data on more than 100 million patent documents from around the world. Supporting information can help you understand whether a patent has been granted and if it is still in force.
You can use Espacenet to:
- search and find patent publications
- machine-translate patent documents
- track the progress of emerging technologies
- find solutions to technical problems
- see what your competitors are developing
Features
When you use Espacenet, you also have access to a number of helpful tools and resources.
Classification search
Classification search is a powerful tool for you if you need to retrieve patent publications in a particular technical area. Classification search in Espacenet helps you to find suitable classification symbols for your search, and then to apply in the search itself.
Global Dossier
Applicants often file patent applications for the same invention at multiple patent offices. Global Dossier brings these documents together in one place, to give you access to the correspondence (or “file wrapper”) between applicants/attorneys and the offices concerned for Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, Korean, US and PCT applications. It also offers you automatic machine translations of Chinese, Japanese and Korean documents into English.
Global Dossier is available from the European Patent Register and Espacenet.
Common Citation Document
The Common Citation Document (CCD) tool provides a single point of access to citation data for the patent applications of the largest five IP offices (IP5).
This tool consolidates the prior art cited by all participating offices for the family members of a patent application, showing the search results from different offices on a single page.
- Access Common Citation Document on the five IP offices website
- Watch the recording of a webinar on CCD
Services & activities
Our services
The Office's core activity is the search and examination of patent applications and the grant of European patents. We also provide patent information and training services.
The EPO’s quality management is certified under the ISO 9001 standard.
The feedback of our users is very important to us. User consultation takes many different forms.
European and international co-operation
The Office works in close co-operation with the patent offices of the member states and other countries around the world.
The European Patent Academy provides patent-related training to lawyers, patent office staff, judges and other interested parties.
The Chief Economist unit provides expertise and analysis to foster well-informed policy debate on issues relating to patents, innovation and economic growth.
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Patents and IP
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