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Peer-to-Patent Australia is an initiative designed to improve the patent examination process and the quality of issued patents by connecting the review of pending patents to an open network of experts online. Peer-to-Patent Australia is focused on helping patent offices perform high-quality examinations of pending patent applications by enlisting the public to help find and explain prior art. The objective of Peer-to-Patent Australia is to improve the patent examination process and the quality of issued patents by inviting members of the public to identify and nominate prior art relevant to the assessment of novelty and inventiveness of participating patent applications. This initiative allows the patent office to harness the expertise of qualified people within the community when assessing patent applications by inviting members of the public to identify and nominate prior art relevant to the assessment of novelty and inventiveness of participating patent applications. In doing so, it connects with the broader initiative to use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and invigorate government administration through citizen engagement. == Rationale == To justify the award of a patent in Australia, the invention claimed must be novel and involve an inventive step when compared with the prior art base. The prior art base is the state of the art, or the technology in existence, immediately before the priority date, which is usually the date that the patent application is filed. In other words, to justify the grant of a patent, an invention must not have been seen before and must be inventive in the eyes of someone skilled in the relevant art when compared with the existing technology. Prior art can include earlier patents, academic papers, magazine articles, web pages, and even physical examples. Patent examiners compare a claimed invention with the prior art to determine if a given invention is both novel and not obvious to a person of ordinary skill and creativity of the invention. Currently in Australia, patent examiners have the sole responsibility for searching for prior art. They have a time budget of a few hours. Peer-to-Patent attempts to improve the patent process by markedly expanding the prior art search. The reasoning behind the proposal is that if prior art exists for an invention, particularly non-patent prior art, someone in the world knows about it. This knowledgeable person may be competitors in the same field, students or professors, or owners of an earlier embodiment of the invention. Peer-to-Patent Australia encourages such people to submit examples of prior art and creates communities of people worldwide who are interested in discovering prior art. Peer-to-Patent uses social software features to facilitate discussion amongst groups of volunteer experts. Users can upload prior art references, participate in discussion forums, rate other user submissions, add research references, invite others, and more. This helps the examiners focus their attention on the submission(s) of prior art that have the highest relevance to an application. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peer-to-Patent Australia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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