A company that for years has been providing information about patents
worldwide is moving to the Web with the help of
Microsoft, the firm will announce today.
Derwent is launching a new service,
Patent Explorer, developed by Microsoft, that will allow users to search for
patents in the United States and Europe.
Users will be charged a few dollars on a per-document basis or will be able
to pay a hefty sum--beginning at $20,000--for unlimited
use of the site for a year.
Derwent, founded in 1951, has made a business of taking publicly
available patent documents from around the globe, analyzing and summarizing
them, and then publishing the results for its paying customers on a variety of media including paper, CD-ROM, and via a closed online network.
The move to the Web will make the documents that much more accessible--both
to one-time users who wouldn't necessarily subscribe to the service and to a
variety of people who might be daunted by a closed online network but who
already have Web access.
For instance, not only will librarians (the company's typical customers) be able to access
the information, but end users such as engineers and chemists also will be able to do so.
"We will put this on the desktop where they don't have to learn any new
language," said David Smith, Derwent general manager for North America. "That's
tremendously empowering and really improves the efficiency of their
organization."
Other services that catalog and sell public records also have brought
their services to the Web, taking advantage of the universal interface.
"It is a highly searchable database," said product manager
Charles Gold, adding that "2,500 U.S. patents are issued each
week."
In addition, he said patent documents often are written obtusely
to obscure the invention.
Patent Explorer supports Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 and above as
well as Netscape Navigator 2.0.