At the Global Dossier Taskforce meeting in January 2013, IP5 Industry asked for the IP5 Offices to develop capabilities to allow the display of file wrapper data at application family level. Tools displaying this information are of great value to users and examiners alike because they aggregate the file wrapper data of the IP5 family members of an application in a single location.
At the June 2013 IP5 Heads of Office meeting, the IP5 Heads agreed to pursue this industry vision. However, it was decided that it would be more efficient for each office to use its own tools in disseminating Global Dossier file wrapper data rather than having a single IP5 location, as this would enable the IP5 Offices to use existing tools in their own language.
The One Portal Dossier (OPD) service providing IP5 file wrapper data to IP5 examiners was launched in July 2013. The OPD is a platform for the secure exchange of dossier information between the IP5 Offices.
In a project led by the JPO and WIPO, the OPD system was linked to WIPO CASE in March 2014. With this linkage OPD has the potential to become a global work-sharing network. In 2016, all IP5 Offices will establish a link from OPD to WIPO CASE.
In June 2014 the EPO deployed the first tool ("European Global Dossier" on the European Patent Register) leveraging the OPD technology to display CNIPA file wrapper data. By the end of 2015, all IP5 Offices were providing file wrapper data in a standardised format allowing the viewing of all IP5 file wrapper documents from any one IP5 Office.
The IP5 Heads welcomed the three achievements in the Global Dossier initative at their meeting hosted by the JPO in Tokyo in June 2016:
- Examiners at the IP5 Offices have one-stop access to dossier information from all IP5 Offices via OPD
- All IP5 Offices will link OPD to WIPO CASE in 2016, enabling them to share dossier information with countries and organisations participating in WIPO CASE (24 as of June 2016)
- All IP5 Offices provide public access to Global Dossier in 2016
At the fourth IP5 Global Dossier Task Force Meeting in Munich on 18 January 2017, IP5 Industry requested a document presenting an overview of the scope, content, availability, timeliness and performance of the IP5 Global Dossier initiatives at the IP5 Offices. The resulting IP5 Global Dossier "Quality" document was distributed to IP5 Industry at the IP5 Heads and Industry meeting on 31 May 2017. This document addresses these topics and provides a relevant indication of the quality and performance of the tool. It also provides an agreed baseline upon which the IP5 Offices can propose and prioritise further enhancements.