Collaborative Search Pilot

The pilot, running from November 1, 2017 through October 31, 2020, is designed to accelerate examination and provide the applicant with more comprehensive prior art by combining the search expertise of examiners at the USPTO and JPO or KIPO before issuing an office action in the patent application. The USPTO will consider partner office’s references, including "A" category documents, in the First Action on the Merits (FAOM) and include those references on form PTO-892 to reduce the applicant’s IDS burden.

Improvements made in this expanded version of the CSP program include removing the dependence on the First Action Interview (FAI) program, incorporation of references cited by partner offices in the FAOM, a further reduction in the time from petition grant to FAOM, and reducing the requirement for claims correspondence to be limited to independent claims.

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• The U.S. application must be a nonreissue, non-provisional utility application or an international application that has entered the national stage. Plant applications are also eligible if KIPO is the designated partner IP office. The U.S. application and all corresponding counterpart applications must have a common earliest priority date.
• The U.S. application must contain 3 or fewer independent claims and 20 or fewer total claims directed to a single invention. The U.S. application must not contain any multiple dependent claims.
• Petitions are required in both offices before examination has commenced. The USPTO’s CSP petition form can be filed via EFS-Web or Patent Center.
• An English translation of the foreign claims is required if the application in the designated partner IP office is not publicly available in English. A machine translation is sufficient. Please use doc code CLM.CSP for any claim documents submitted to satisfy this requirement. Do not use doc code CLM for these translated claim sets.
• There must be a remaining slot in the program. Each IP office will grant no more than 400 requests per year per partner office. As of June 17, 2020, greater than 75% of the slots are available for both JPO and KIPO.

For further details, see the October 2017 Federal Register Notice announcing the expanded CSP.

• CSP petition form (If not already available in English, a translated copy of the foreign claims is required. A machine translation is sufficient. Please use doc code CLM.CSP for any claim documents submitted to satisfy this requirement. Do not use doc code CLM for these translated claim sets.)
• April 2020 Patent Quality Chat on worksharing efforts (CSP portion starts at 13:55)
• CSP 2017 presentation slides
• Federal Register Notice
• Press release

In 2015, the USPTO signed two independent collaborative search pilot Memoranda of Cooperation – one with the JPO and another with the KIPO.  The purpose of these two pilots was to provide our stakeholders with search results from two offices early in the examination process so the applicant could determine their next steps in patent prosecution.

Both pilots ran for two years. For more information about our initial CSPs, see the general CSP info document.

JPO pilot - August 1, 2015 through July 31, 2017

The USPTO and the JPO exchanged serially developed search and evaluation results identifying more comprehensive prior art and provide a work product that incorporates the efforts of the two offices. Review the workflow process for a better understanding.

KIPO pilot - September 1, 2015 through August 31, 2017

The KIPO and the USPTO conducted two independent searches and provided both work products to the applicant for consideration.  The workflow process provides a better understanding.

CSP successes and statistics

The applications completed so far in the initial CSP program showed that all offices contributed relevant prior art to the prosecution history – with the result being a significant reduction in prosecution time and that very few applications needed a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) to complete prosecution – with over a 90% allowance rate. The expanded CSP builds on these successes and continues to improve compact prosecution and enhance patent quality.

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