Subject Guide
Brown Science & Engineering Library
Office - I046
ep9k@virginia.edu
Copyright
These sites help to explain many aspects of copyright and intellectual property rights management. Please check with a librarian for more information -- or consult the University's Office of General Counsel for more detailed information.
- Copyright Information Resources (U.Va. Libraries)Links to resources dealing with copyright, fair use, works in the public domain, and obtaining permission to use copyrighted works.
- Creative CommonsCreative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.
- Issues in Scholarly CommunicationsLinks to various articles and web pages discussiing issues related to scholarly publishing.
- Science CommonsScience Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research by identifying unnecessary barriers to research and crafting guidelines and legal agreements to lower those barriers.
Searching for Patents
Patents are a record of the technological inventiveness and commercial activities of a nation. They are of essential interest of many engineers and scientists, particularly those in academe who may develop new products and processes and who wish to protect their intellectual property or inventions.
There are many online resources for researching patent information. A few major ones are listed below. For more in-depth searching or if you are looking for an obscure patent or trademark, please consult with a librarian for assistance. You may also find the Patent Information LibGuide from the Government Information Resources department in Shannon Library of use.
You may also wish to consult with the patent and intellectual property experts in the UVA Innovation office about questions relating to patenting or licensing an invention.
The Intellogist website also provides an excellent interactive patent coverage map that allows you to identify which databases cover full-text and other patent information for a given country.
- Canadian Intellectual Property OfficeThis database lets you access nearly a century of patent descriptions and images. You can search, retrieve and study more than 2,000,000 patent documents.
- European Patent Office Portal (Espacenet)The European Patent Office provides both consolidated and individual access to the patent records of its members through this gateway.
- Free Patents OnlineThe FreePatentsOnline search engine is one of the most powerful, fastest and easiest patent search engines on the web. Their search allows advanced search techniques such as word stemming, proximity searching, relevancy ranking and search term weighting to help you find exactly what you are looking for.
- Google Patent SearchUsing Google to search for and view patent information is often the simplest and easiest method. For detailed searching, go to the USPTO site.
- Japanese PatentsThis page explains one way of finding Japanese patent information.
- Lexis-Nexis Patent DatabaseChoose "US Legal" button at left of screen, then "Patents". Use restricted to UVa faculty, students and staff from UVa networked computers or with a proxy server account.
- Patent LensProvides access to a federated search engine to four major patent databases: U.S., European, Australian and World Intellectual Property Organization.
- TESS - Trademark Electronic Search SystemTESS allows you to search current and historic United States trademark information online.
- United States Patent and Trademark OfficeThe USPTO online database offers a variety of ways to search for patents and patent applications, but viewing some patents may require installing a proprietary viewer on your browser.
Patent Tutorials
- Guide to Patent SearchingA series of tutorials from the McKinney Engineering Library at the University of Texas.
Use the online tutorials below to learn more about patents and trademarks and how to search for them.
- Patent Fundamentals for Scientists and EngineersOnline version of the classic text from the CRC Press. (U.Va. only)
- UVa Innovation (the University of Virginia Patent Foundation)The U.Va. office ready to help you patent your inventions and discoveries and to answer your questions about patents.