Patent Database Deficiencies

According to an April 3, 3005 article in New Scientist, of the 45 million patent documents that have been digitised worldwide so far, only 15 million have a full text version, and not one patent office has a searchable full-text version of all its publications. Even though most online patent archives are incomplete, parts of the paper-based collections that preceded them are being destroyed. Dutch patent-information provider Univentio has also reportedly discovered that Espacenet, the European online patent database, is missing 322,000 UK Patent Office documents, plus 186,000 and 17,000 patents respectively from the French and German offices.