On the reference desk last week I got a question that eventually revealed an unfortunate limitation of esp@cenet, the website of the European Patent Office. If you recall, I've been touting esp@cenet over the years as a way to access patents, including US patents, in PDF form, as opposed to the silly, difficult-to-work-with format on the USPTO website. This isn't as much of an issue now that Google Patents offers PDF versions of US patents, but something you should still be aware of.
The patron was on esp@cenet accessing a German patent. She found the patent, loaded the PDF, and saved it the way you would normally save a PDF. However, when she went to the saved copy on her computer and opened it, it acted like it had only saved one page. When she tried to move beyond the visible page, she got a strange error message.
To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened. It turns out that on esp@cenet, if a patent is more than 50 pages, you can't download or print the whole thing - you have to save or print it one page at a time. This is obviously not very helpful, since a lot of patents are long. If it's less than 50 pages, it works just fine - you can download and print the whole thing with reckless abandon and unbridled glee.
Take a look at esp@cenet to see the problem yourself. Do a number search for WO2007062371, and click on the patent name. Click on the "original document" tab to view the PDF. Save the PDF, then open the saved file and notice what happens when you try to go to another page. Yuck! Back in the browser window, you'll notice above the patent title it says "document too large." That basically means that working with this patent is going to be a pain in the butt.
There are some workarounds. The "description" tab gives most of the text from the patent, and you can copy and paste that into a Word document. The format is messy and there aren't any figures, but you can then save the individual pages from the patent that have relevant figures. Not a perfect option by any means, but better than nothing.
Additionally, the same patent may have been applied for in multiple countries, so there very well may be a US version of the patent. You can search Google Patents to see if one is available (bearing in mind that patents take a long time to be issued, so there may not be a US one available yet - seemingly the case with the example above). Also, SciFinder Scholar usually includes international patent numbers, so you can look up the patent in there and see if it gives a US patent number.
I can only assume that it's always been this way with esp@cenet, and I just never noticed before, because I can't believe they would have taken such a big step back in usability. I did find a 102-page US patent on Google Patents, and was able to download that with no problem.
So, that's that. It still sucks, but at least you can now explain why it's happening if you get the question, and have some alternative methods to try.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!
Liz
Posted by biomedref at July 16, 2007 01:30 PM