Australian patents now under the Lens

The full text of all 115,000 granted Australian patents has been added to the Patent Lens, a worldwide open source informatics platform.

The Patent Lens is part of CAMBIA, a not-for-profit organisation set up by molecular biologist and entrepreneur Dr Richard Jefferson and based in Canberra.

It aims to create new technologies and tools for the life sciences and also involves the BiOS, or Biological Open Source movement initiative.

Patent Lens now allows the full text of Australian patents to be searched, viewed and printed at no cost.

In addition to the full text of over 115,000 Australian granted patents, over 580,000 patent applications have been added to the collection of almost seven million worldwide patent documents.

"Until now, the crucial information in Australian patents, such as what was invented and what is claimed, simply has not been searchable, Jefferson said.

"If you don't know what's out there, you can't know whether you can deliver your own inventions and ideas. And you can't build on others' work. Worldwide innovation depends on clarity and transparency of patent rights."

Jefferson said researchers, investors, policy advisors and business and legal professionals wanting to search Australians patents had limited options until now.

Previous publicly available searches were limited to the 'front page' information such as titles, patent numbers and inventors' names, he said.