Access to Relevant Prior Art Initiative

The Access to Relevant Prior Art (RPA) Initiative is a continuing effort to increase patent examination quality and efficiency through the development of an automated tool for USPTO examiners in their examination system, which imports relevant prior art and other pertinent information into pending U.S. patent applications as early as possible. The information may be imported from relevant sources such as related U.S. applications, counterpart foreign applications, and related international applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). This initiative is envisioned to potentially reduce the burden on applicants with complying with the duty of disclosure.

Envisioned benefits

• Simplifies application process for applicant
• Speeds up examination process
• Increases efficiency of prosecution procedures
• Improves prosecution quality
• Increases data consistency

Overview

The USPTO has been exploring how to best utilize electronic resources to provide examiners with information (e.g. prior art, search reports, etc.) from applicant’s other applications as early as possible to increase patent examination quality and efficiency. These other applications could have the same or substantially the same disclosure (e.g., domestic parent and counterpart foreign applications) as the U.S. application being examined. In addition to improving patent examination quality and efficiency, the automatic import of such information early on in the application process may reduce applicant’s burden to provide this information to the USPTO.

Research and evaluation was conducted to evaluate the potential to import information (e.g., prior art and search reports) into pending U.S. applications from existing resources, including Global Dossier, Common Citation Document, WIPO’s PatentScope, and USPTO internal IT systems.  Functionality was developed in a new tool to provide notice to the applicant of relevant information and references imported and considered.

This initiative has been divided into multiple phases of development and implementation, as follows:

Phase 1

The goal for Phase 1 has been to develop the automated tool for examiners, providing them with the ability to view a master reference list, including references cited in the instant application (by applicant and examiner) and imported references from immediate U.S. parent applications (cited by applicant and examiner, but not third parties). The user interface provides enhanced functionality, such as filtering the reference list and creating a search string of U.S. patent documents that could be imported into existing or new search tools. A Federal Register Notice announcing the release of Phase 1 was published in October 2018.

While this initial effort was received positively by both patent applicants and patent examiners, resource constraints limited the expansion of the initiative until recently. With the development of a new tool to automate part of the process, we are now expanding this initiative to one workgroup in each Technology Center for a total of 61 art units.

Further expansion to additional Art Units is envisioned for 2026.

The USPTO determines whether an application meets the conditions for inclusion in the first phase of the RPA Initiative after the Office of Patent Application Processing completes pre-examination processing of the continuing application. Applicants receive a Notice of Imported Citations informing them of their application’s inclusion in the Initiative and listing the citations from the immediate parent application that have been imported into the application. For more information, see RPA Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

Future phases

Subsequent phases of the project will focus on importing from additional sources, such as counterpart foreign and PCT applications, and providing examiners access to text-searchable copies of documents in the master reference list. Efforts for expansion of this initiative are currently underway and more details will be shared soon.

Previous user input

User feedback on this initiative was solicited via a Federal Register Notice (FRN) published in August 2016. The FRN asked for user input on specific aspects of the initiative and announced a public roundtable. The roundtable was held on September 28, 2016.  Written comments in response to the FRN inquiries were accepted until October 28, 2016.

We want to hear from you

Extensive internal and external stakeholder outreach will continue to better understand the needs of both examiners and applicants, such as how functionality in the tool should be designed and what information should be presented.

Provide your feedback on the RPA Initiative or contact us at PriorArtAccess@uspto.gov.