Research Disclosure

Why disclose?

The RD service provides an inventor with a quick and economic conduit to disclose an invention or idea where a patent is inappropriate or where it is not considered worth the time and expense of first patenting, and then maintaining.

Every major country has a patent system to grant monopolies to inventors to exploit their inventions commercially and induce them to provide patent specifications, instead of keeping the details to themselves. Clearly this is in the public interest but only in the case of a true invention. Patent laws provide that a patent is valid only if it covers an innovation that differs inventively from what was previously known.

If an inventor decides against patenting his invention on the grounds of cost, or for any other reason, he is still likely to want to exploit it. The best way to achieve this is to publish (disclose) the invention quickly to prevent it from being validly patented by a later applicant.

Disclosing an invention or idea prevents anyone else obtaining a patent for that invention as it can be proved that it already existed, and was available to the public at large on a particular date. This technique is often known as defensive publication.

RD was established to provide for the certain and convenient publication of inventions as disclosures worldwide. As it is distributed to patent offices and libraries worldwide it ensures that, regardless of the different novelty standards of national patent systems, any item published in RD thereafter renders the invention described unpatentable.

'PCT Minimum Documentation status
underlines
RD's
importance to patent
examining authorities'

To be fully effective, a disclosure must dissuade others from attempting to patent the disclosed invention and save the discloser later having to take legal action. A disclosure must come to the attention of any potential applicant and it has the best chance of doing so if it appears in a journal and database certain to be considered by a competent searcher. RD is certainly such a journal and database, borne out by the thousands of references to RD articles cited in patent search reports issued by, amongst many others, United States, European, United Kingdom and Japanese patent examiners.

The fact that the patent offices of the PCT member states nominated and granted RD a PCT Minimum Documentation list status further underlines its importance to patent examining authorities. Indisputably past issues of RD are included in the comprehensive collections of patent specifications - forming the basic search material - of the more important patent searching institutions worldwide.

While RD is primarily intended for the disclosure of inventions, it is very suitable for the publication of other matter relevant to patenting. For example a disclosure in the form of a survey of the patents literature on a particular topic can be of value as a reference for inclusion in later patent specifications.

Another advantage of publishing in RD is that the date of publication is known exactly, it being possible to choose the issue in which a disclosure appears by submitting the text for publication at the appropriate time. This makes it possible to publish an invention in RD at the time when that invention is first exploited commercially. If any question later arises as to priority, then the date of publication of RD can be relied upon, instead of the date of sale of the product. A date of sale is often difficult to establish, requiring authenticated and unequivocal evidence of how the invention was used in the manufacture of the product and of how a particular sample of the product was distributed and sold.

With the ever-increasing patents fees throughout the world, RD is an economical, easy and highly valuable supplement, or alternative, to patenting.