Verified Publication and Prior Art
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Recently, on the Patent Information Users Group discussion list, we picked up an email conversation among registered users of the PIUG that raised questions and concerns that re-publication on PubMed Central, while a valuable additional source for online access to information that might be evidence of prior art, does not help establish with any authority the "publication date" or the "public availability date" of the information published in participating journals. As one industry specialist observed:
Websites are notorious for not posting availability dates or publication dates, or for posting dates that later get revised with reloads. Just as masters theses are often problematic prior art documents, not just from a retrieval perspective, but from proof of publication or public availability dates. Universities vary widely in their treatment of their own Masters theses. Some are accessioned like standard publications, get date stamped, cataloged normally,etc., but others merely sit on special collection shelves with no way to prove public availability until someone checks them out!
It is certainly difficult, if not impossible, to verify publication dates of online content. That is why many companies and individuals publish their documents not only in a specific trade journal, but also in secure online environments such as the IP.com Prior Art Database to provide a non-refereed destination for technical disclosures and other documents which need verifiable dates of publication.
If participants in this discussion on the PIUG discussion list and other readers here would like to share thoughts and experiences verifying dates of publication of online documents, we'd be very interested in your comments.
