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More effective publishing?
EDITORIAL More Effective Publishing? Guest editorial by M. W. Hill, Director, The British Library, Science Reference Library, London
Readers of previous issues of this Journal will by now be convinced - if indeed they ever had any doubts that patent documents contain a wealth of valuable information. Nevertheless, even the keenest advocates of their use have to admit that the system makes the required information too often too tedious to find. Even to the most experienced searcher the sheer mass of paper, growing now at a rate of about 10 million pages each year, is both daunting and depressing. One cannot see the timber for the wood pulp. Nor can the very small numbers of each patent document actually sold bring any glow of satisfaction to publisher or printer. Surely it is high time to look again at the way patent information is published and disseminated, this time with very critical eyes and with the scope for radical change that modern technology provides very much in mind. In our present situation, invention is the mother of necessity. Basically patent documents have changed little for over a hundred years. The preliminary data has increased, and helpfully so, but the body of the document has hardly changed. True, letterpress has given way to offset litho reproduction of typescript or to computer type-setting but if the former has helped to keep costs down and increase speed of production it has also, so far, served to increase the document's bulk. In fairness, there has been one major change: the introduction of microforms - roll film; strip; aperture card; and fiche. As is so often the case, attempts to use such a different form in exactly the same way as one used eye-legible paper copy have led to disappointment and hence to rejection by many workers. Nevertheless, microforms serve very valuable purposes and are often preferable to paper copy (provided the image quality is high) but for detailed study it is necessary to print out eye-legible copy. Patent Offices are not the only publishers faced with the problems of producing documents with only small print runs to very tight time schedules at weekly intervals or of selling copies at only infrequent intervals. Those who publish journals, reports and instruction manuals are evaluating, in some cases have already adopted, one or more techniques of electronic publishing and on-demand printing (already used in some Patent Offices rather than holding stocks of paper copy) is becoming increasingly common. Is it possible that electronic publishing could provide the answer that would meet the widely varying needs of the different categories of user of patent information? It is, of course,all too easy to get carried away with enthusiasm for new technology and then find, sometimes after very costly trials, that it is not really suitable. The world of invention will have no difficulty World Patent Information 2 (1980) No. 2 Editorial
thinking of examples. Equally it is very easy to be cynical about the latest crazes or to adopt an unambitious wait-and-see attitude. Such caution is encouraged by Woodward's assessment of the electronic journal. In 1976 he said that the successful introduction of electronic journals would probably be in new subject areas not already served by conventional media and will provide a communication system that is less formal than that which currently exists. Not very promising for the well established and highly formal world of patents. Nevertheless, the Word Processor is now very widely used instead of the conventional typewriter and its disc store of the script provides an opportunity for paperless communication. Electronic storage, indexing, retrieval and transmission of information of verbal and numeric type have become almost commonplace in recent years. Even printed material can be nowadays directly read into computer store so that back runs of printed material can, at a cost, be put into the same system as direct input new data. But in patents, as in the scientific journal, words and numbers are not the whole story. Diagrams are of crucial importance. For this reason the videodisc may be the key development (Alan Horder of the National Reprographic Centre for documentation has recently reviewed their potential for information storage and retrieval) and Viewdata style transmission opens up interesting possibilities. Nor should holographic techniques be ignored. Indeed, one of the problems that may have to be faced is the number of new technologies available and the rate at which new developments are appearing. Since the new publishing technologies open up the possibility of the paperless patent, it will obviously be necessary, as when embarking on any project to computerise an operation, to analyse very carefully what the real requirements are. The patent document, to which we have become so accustomed, is presumably designed to meet all requirements from the one document. How necessary is it to publish in this way? For what proportion of uses is the whole of the present document actually needed? If this p r o p o r t i o n is substantial then the present method may in the end prove to be the most cost-effective way of publishing. But if, as is possible, the majority of uses involve only parts of the document - sometimes just the claims; sometimes just the examples; sometimes just the account of the problem the invention aims to solve - it may be that a system which allows the display of only preselected sections may be preferable. In fact to do this would be merely to continue along a path which we are already treading. The separable front page of some documents allows us to store and 51
access just the bibliographic data and an abstract. Indexes of names, with title and document number are separately published. The U.S. Official Gazette reproduces the bibliographic data with the main claim. Meanwhile the various on-line services that are available enable us to extract varying combinations of the brief data. May not the separate availability of all this data be one reason why the demand for copies of the actual specifications is so low? In other words, a number of types of information search do not need the whole document. Another reason may be the photocopying machine. It is generally much quicker to get a p h o t o c o p y from a nearby collection than it is to get a printed copy from the appropriate patent office. Facsimile transmission over telephone lines is not yet a satisfactory solution but it could be that direct print out from electronically stored text would be, particularly if one need print out only the part required. One of the problems that has bedevilled attempts to improve on publication methods for patent specifications is the diagrams. It is not the question of reproducing them, both microforms and now electronic media, including holographic methods, can do that. Rather it is the need to be able to read the text at the same time as looking at the diagram because the diagram carries no explanatory legends. It may be that electronic publishing could solve this if patent offices cannot be prevailed upon to insist that diagrams should always be submitted in a self-explanatory form. There should be little technical difficulty in doing what is regularly done on the television screen, namely superimpose the text on the projected diagram, makir~g the text move if it were so lengthy that not all could be comfortably accomodated on the screen without obscuring the diagram. F. W. Lancaster, the eminent American authority, regards progress towards a largely paperless system for information communication as almost inevitable. What is the attitude of the major patent offices and even WIPO? Are they already looking at the possibilities that new technology offers for disseminating the information at present available only on the printed or microform patent document? One imagines that, faced as they are by increasing publication costs, they are doing so and, if so, one hopes that they will soon feel able to tell us what progress they are making and in what direction they see patent publishing moving.
52
Pastor R. MaUing-Hansens Skrivekugle af nyeste Construction. Typing machine invented 1870 by the Reverend R. MailingHansen, Copenhagen. Reproduced with the kind permission of Danmarks tekniske Museum.
World Patent Information 2 (1980) No. 2 Editorial
Readers of previous issues of this Journal will by now be convinced - if indeed they ever had any doubts that patent documents contain a wealth of valuable information. Nevertheless, even the keenest advocates of their use have to admit that the system makes the required information too often too tedious to find. Even to the most experienced searcher the sheer mass of paper, growing now at a rate of about 10 million pages each year, is both daunting and depressing. One cannot see the timber for the wood pulp. Nor can the very small numbers of each patent document actually sold bring any glow of satisfaction to publisher or printer. Surely it is high time to look again at the way patent information is published and disseminated, this time with very critical eyes and with the scope for radical change that modern technology provides very much in mind. In our present situation, invention is the mother of necessity. Basically patent documents have changed little for over a hundred years. The preliminary data has increased, and helpfully so, but the body of the document has hardly changed. True, letterpress has given way to offset litho reproduction of typescript or to computer type-setting but if the former has helped to keep costs down and increase speed of production it has also, so far, served to increase the document's bulk. In fairness, there has been one major change: the introduction of microforms - roll film; strip; aperture card; and fiche. As is so often the case, attempts to use such a different form in exactly the same way as one used eye-legible paper copy have led to disappointment and hence to rejection by many workers. Nevertheless, microforms serve very valuable purposes and are often preferable to paper copy (provided the image quality is high) but for detailed study it is necessary to print out eye-legible copy. Patent Offices are not the only publishers faced with the problems of producing documents with only small print runs to very tight time schedules at weekly intervals or of selling copies at only infrequent intervals. Those who publish journals, reports and instruction manuals are evaluating, in some cases have already adopted, one or more techniques of electronic publishing and on-demand printing (already used in some Patent Offices rather than holding stocks of paper copy) is becoming increasingly common. Is it possible that electronic publishing could provide the answer that would meet the widely varying needs of the different categories of user of patent information? It is, of course,all too easy to get carried away with enthusiasm for new technology and then find, sometimes after very costly trials, that it is not really suitable. The world of invention will have no difficulty World Patent Information 2 (1980) No. 2 Editorial
thinking of examples. Equally it is very easy to be cynical about the latest crazes or to adopt an unambitious wait-and-see attitude. Such caution is encouraged by Woodward's assessment of the electronic journal. In 1976 he said that the successful introduction of electronic journals would probably be in new subject areas not already served by conventional media and will provide a communication system that is less formal than that which currently exists. Not very promising for the well established and highly formal world of patents. Nevertheless, the Word Processor is now very widely used instead of the conventional typewriter and its disc store of the script provides an opportunity for paperless communication. Electronic storage, indexing, retrieval and transmission of information of verbal and numeric type have become almost commonplace in recent years. Even printed material can be nowadays directly read into computer store so that back runs of printed material can, at a cost, be put into the same system as direct input new data. But in patents, as in the scientific journal, words and numbers are not the whole story. Diagrams are of crucial importance. For this reason the videodisc may be the key development (Alan Horder of the National Reprographic Centre for documentation has recently reviewed their potential for information storage and retrieval) and Viewdata style transmission opens up interesting possibilities. Nor should holographic techniques be ignored. Indeed, one of the problems that may have to be faced is the number of new technologies available and the rate at which new developments are appearing. Since the new publishing technologies open up the possibility of the paperless patent, it will obviously be necessary, as when embarking on any project to computerise an operation, to analyse very carefully what the real requirements are. The patent document, to which we have become so accustomed, is presumably designed to meet all requirements from the one document. How necessary is it to publish in this way? For what proportion of uses is the whole of the present document actually needed? If this p r o p o r t i o n is substantial then the present method may in the end prove to be the most cost-effective way of publishing. But if, as is possible, the majority of uses involve only parts of the document - sometimes just the claims; sometimes just the examples; sometimes just the account of the problem the invention aims to solve - it may be that a system which allows the display of only preselected sections may be preferable. In fact to do this would be merely to continue along a path which we are already treading. The separable front page of some documents allows us to store and 51
access just the bibliographic data and an abstract. Indexes of names, with title and document number are separately published. The U.S. Official Gazette reproduces the bibliographic data with the main claim. Meanwhile the various on-line services that are available enable us to extract varying combinations of the brief data. May not the separate availability of all this data be one reason why the demand for copies of the actual specifications is so low? In other words, a number of types of information search do not need the whole document. Another reason may be the photocopying machine. It is generally much quicker to get a p h o t o c o p y from a nearby collection than it is to get a printed copy from the appropriate patent office. Facsimile transmission over telephone lines is not yet a satisfactory solution but it could be that direct print out from electronically stored text would be, particularly if one need print out only the part required. One of the problems that has bedevilled attempts to improve on publication methods for patent specifications is the diagrams. It is not the question of reproducing them, both microforms and now electronic media, including holographic methods, can do that. Rather it is the need to be able to read the text at the same time as looking at the diagram because the diagram carries no explanatory legends. It may be that electronic publishing could solve this if patent offices cannot be prevailed upon to insist that diagrams should always be submitted in a self-explanatory form. There should be little technical difficulty in doing what is regularly done on the television screen, namely superimpose the text on the projected diagram, makir~g the text move if it were so lengthy that not all could be comfortably accomodated on the screen without obscuring the diagram. F. W. Lancaster, the eminent American authority, regards progress towards a largely paperless system for information communication as almost inevitable. What is the attitude of the major patent offices and even WIPO? Are they already looking at the possibilities that new technology offers for disseminating the information at present available only on the printed or microform patent document? One imagines that, faced as they are by increasing publication costs, they are doing so and, if so, one hopes that they will soon feel able to tell us what progress they are making and in what direction they see patent publishing moving.
52
Pastor R. MaUing-Hansens Skrivekugle af nyeste Construction. Typing machine invented 1870 by the Reverend R. MailingHansen, Copenhagen. Reproduced with the kind permission of Danmarks tekniske Museum.
World Patent Information 2 (1980) No. 2 Editorial