Research Disclosure, or RD, is a defensive publication service that allows you to protect an invention as an alternative to patenting. If you have decided not to patent your invention on the grounds of cost or for any other reason, but you still wish to exploit it commercially, you must take some simple steps to protect it. Otherwise you risk the chance that someone else may later patent your invention and so prevent you from exploiting it yourself. It may sound unbelievable but it can and does happen!

You can protect yourself by publishing (disclosing) your invention as quickly as possible and so establish prior art. This is what RD does, we are the world’s industry standard disclosure service. Every month we publish details of many inventions, both in our paper format RD Journal and also in our RD Electronic database. These are then distributed to every major patent office and many libraries worldwide. As RD is distributed to patent offices globally it ensures that, regardless of the different novelty standards of national patent systems, any item published in RD thereafter renders the invention described unpatentable by anyone else.