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Annual Technical Report on Patent Information Activities in 2019 submitted by BA/Institute for Intellectual Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina 

I. GENERAL OVERVIEW OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN PATENT INFORMATION ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE OFFICE


By the BA IPR plan for 2019, the following main activities were set:

  • Development of the financial register;
  • Development of the WEB interface for online payment;
  • Linking with the patent register;
  • Improvement of the Federated European Patent Register;
  • Development of an on-line tool.

 Main goal of Institute for intellectual property of Bosnia and Herzegovina was to increase the number of domestic users of the system of intellectual property protection in the field of patents through reviewing the existing technical and information services and by improving the quality and effectiveness of promotional activities through cooperation with relevant regional and international organizations.

The EPO was in the process of implementing the Federated European Patent Register which makes it possible for the user to access national register data in a harmonised way. The project provided a harmonised Europe wide entry point to access the national registers of the participating member states. The project is presumed to provide better data quality and content in the Federated Patent Register, increased user friendliness and user benefits.

In order to allow Bosnia and Herzegovina to participate in the project, the EPO supported the Institute for Intellectual Property to create its national register and related modules to electronically manage the patent process in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Currently, there is a fully operational Register in the  IIP of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the 2019 year, the existing Register was subject of the improvements and BA IPR worked on developments of the financial register;

Regarding the Activity Improvement of the Federated European Patent Register Institute for Intellectual Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina had a lot of responsibilities:

-Co-ordination of the project at national level

-Operational of the electronic national patent register at the national premises

-Operational of a web service offering access to the federation European patent Register

-Ensure the quality and the completeness of the national data

In its new stage the project anticipates the completion of the phase 2 the so called “federated retrieval”.

Migration of data and functionality from the existing system to a new, open-source platform with the significant improvements made related to the work in the Internet environment which will improve a number of services of the Office.


II. SERVICES AND ACTIVITIES RELATED TO PATENT INFORMATION CARRIED OUT BY THE OFFICE


In the year 2019, the main activities related to patent information carried out by the Institute for Intellectual property of Bosnia and Herzegovina were:

-Development of the financial register

-Development of the new module in patent register in order to enable connection patent register with a new financial register

-Improvement of the Federated European Patent Register;

In 2019 the BA IPR actively participated in cooperation with the European Patent Office (EPO) in the Project regarding the improvement of the Federated European Patent Register;

           Federated European Patent Register - continuation of activities related to the creation of Federative European Patent Register for improving the access to information about the legal status of a granted/validated European patent. BA is one of the countries whose Register is deeply linked via European Patent Register, working on its integration into the second phase, so called parallel retrieval.

Since February 1st, 2018, the Institute for Intellectual Property of Bosnia and Herzegovina provides access to data on the requests for extension of European patents to Bosnia and Herzegovina through the Federated European Patent Register.

This service was upgraded on April 1, 2019 so it is now possible to obtain detailed information on the legal status of applications/patents i.e. information on the dates of legal status change as well as the data on the last paid annuities by individual applications/patents.

The data from the BA register are updated on the day of user's access to the service.

More information can be found at:

https://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/legal/register/documentation/federated-register.html

The Institute for Intellectual Property is currently prepared for delivering full-text front file data to the EPO in the EPO defined format.

The IIP has scanned their patent documentation and the corpora is available in digital format. The remaining work is related to transformation of the images into digital full-text XML format and therefore the OCR-ing is required.

IIP has the entire collection of national patent documents (around 3400) in digital format.

The collection contains:

  • all public applications starting from 1993 have been scanned;
  • all granted patents starting from 1993 have been scanned;
  • bibliographic data collected covering the above applications / granted patents.


The aim of the continuation of this project is the BA IIP to exchange the publication front file data with the EPO, according to the three aspects of Quality at Source (QaS): completeness, correctness and timeliness. Following aspects are to be considered:

  • standards and formats used,
  • accuracy of the data sent, and
  • timeliness and regularity of delivery.

The following activities was implemented in the following two stages:

Stage one: implementation of front file data with QaS as defined in the first stage of the project, covering the following data types: bibliographic, images, abstracts, full-text (including embedded images), citations.

Stage two: targets the covering the back-file scanning and OCR-ing of all patent documents from 1993 to date. Competition of stage is the precondition to move to stage two of the project.

In 2019 the BA IPR in co-operation with the European Patent Office finished the implementation of the "Bilateral Co-operation Plan” (BCP) for the period 2018 – 2019. In the frame of the BCP it was completed various activities such as training, patent-related IT services and tools, patent information services as well as awareness and strengthening of the European Patent Network (EPN).

One of the strategic objectives of the IIP is to contribute to the development of the intellectual property system in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to promote IP and more specifically patents.

In order to increase the awareness on patent protection and the European patent system, and to increase the visibility of the Institute for Intellectual Property, participation at two fairs per year is envisaged.

EPO supported the participation of the BA IIP at relevant fairs across Bosnia and Herzegovina and relevant fairs in the region and in the EU area. The Institute participated in the International Economic Fair Mostar in 2018 and 2019. As numerous companies from Bosnia and Herzegovina also exhibit at important fairs in Serbia (e.g. the Agricultural fair in Novi Sad) and Croatia, and so Bosnia and Herzegovina represents an equally important market for both the Croatian and Serbian companies.


III. SOURCES OF PATENT INFORMATION PROVIDED BY THE OFFICE



  • Main types of publications of the Office (patent applications, full text, first pages, abstracts, bibliographic data, granted patents, etc.), medium (on paper)
  • Official Gazette : link
  • frequency of publication quarterly (4 times per year)
  • medium (on paper, online)

Since 2008 all issue are available free of charge at the Office's web site. Upon order and against payment Office provides issues of the Gazette on digital carrier. The Official Gazette is published every three month (quarterly).

Official Gazette contains the following published information on patents: Publication of patent applications, Patent application indexes by numbers, classification symbols and applicants, publication of requests for the grant of a patent on the basis of the substantive examination procedure of patent applications, publication of requests for the grant of a patent without the substantive examination of patent applications (Consensual Patents), publication of granted patents and consensual patents, Patent /consensual patent indexes by numbers, classification symbols and owners, Publication of Record of Changes to the respective Register, Publication of the proposals for the Restitutio in Integrum and Continued Processing, publication of the lapse of Patents/Consensual Patents, Publication of a Declaration of Nullity of Patents, Publication of Correction of deficiencies in the published data, publication of Requests for the Extension of the European Patent Applications, publication of European patent application indexes by numbers, classification symbols and applicants, Publication of extended European patents, Lapse of extended European patents, Publication of European Patents, European patent index by numbers, classification and owners, Lapse of European Patents, Corrections of Data to Published European Patents, Publication of Requests for Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPC) and of its extension, Publication of indications concerning the grant of SPC and its refusal, publication of the lapse of SPC.

Detailed legal status information is available in the Patent Register, accessible only to the Office staff, while the basic information on the legal status of EP patent in BA are publicly available in the public patent database via Federated European Patent Register


IV. ICT SUPPORT TO SERVICES AND ACTIVITIES RELATED TO PATENT INFORMATION CARRIED OUT BY THE OFFICE


A wide set of software tools has been developed in-house to support business procedures of the Office, providing a range of tools for efficient processing of the applications and other documents.


V. PROMOTION ACTIVITIES AIMED TO SUPPORT USERS IN ACCESS AND EFFICIENT USE OF PATENT INFORMATION


  • Publications related to different business procedures and patent information sources available to users, for example, books, brochures, Internet publications, etc.
  • Cooperation with universities and Associations of Innovators
  • Education and training:  training courses, e learning modules (URLs), seminars, exhibitions, etc.
  • The Institute participated in the International Economic Fair Mostar

VI. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION ACTIVITIES IN THE FIELD OF PATENT INFORMATION

International exchange and sharing of patent information in machine-readable form, e.g., priority documents, bibliographic data, abstracts, search reports, full text information

The Office exchanges its patent data in machine –readable form with the European Patent Office. All published documents are sent monthly (every two weeks since October 2013) in PDF format as well as bibliographic data in the XML format.

The European Patent Office (EPEO) supported the participation of the BA IIP at relevant fairs in the region and in the EU area. As numerous companies from Bosnia and Herzegovina also exhibit at important fairs in Serbia (e.g. the Agricultural fair in Novi Sad) and Croatia (SASO-Split) and as Bosnia and Herzegovina represents an important market for the Croatian and Serbian companies.

International exchange and sharing of patent information in machine-readable form, e.g., priority documents, bibliographic data, abstracts, search reports, full text information.




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