The Patent Connector has its first partner outside the patent offices: The Lens is live. Intelligence itself is not new here - my own patent reference server was the first such layer. What is new is opening it to an outside partner. The big commercial platforms are in the pipeline too, but I wanted The Lens to be the first official one, on purpose.
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The Lens is a user-supported non-profit social enterprise, on a mission to make the world's patents, scholarly works and biological sequences open and accessible as a public good. Its founder, Richard Jefferson, called this "innovation cartography": sea charts were once guarded state secrets, and he argued innovation needs the opposite, open maps anyone can navigate by. That idea became The Lens in 2013, later relaunched in partnership with SPIE, the photonics society. I hold a simple belief: if you are gifted enough to give something back, you should. Jefferson did exactly that with The Lens, and it is the kind of work I want to support first. Following that spirit I seek to do the same, for example with projects like the freeย Neuropathy DNA Scanner.
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You know my rule: go direct to the office and wire the data through verbatim. That still stands. But patents are national rights, so no single office answers the questions people actually ask. Is this invention still protected, everywhere? Who cites this patent? What is the science behind it? Aggregating and computing across registers is a different job. That job is patent intelligence.
And it stays honest about what it shows you. The legal status The Lens reports is calculated across jurisdictions, and the connector presents it as exactly that: calculated, never dressed up as an official event. Offices give you the record. The Lens gives you the map, labelled as a map.
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- Forward citations - who cites a patent, not just the prior art it points to.
- A calculated legal-status view across jurisdictions.
- The link between patents and the science behind them, both ways.
- Sequence-listing details - which organisms, which types - on biotech filings.
- Worldwide search and bibliographic data.
Bring your own Lens key, as with every connector.
Glad to partner with The Lens. There is more coming.