Critics of the U.S. patent system have long griped that it's entirely too easy to get patents these days on obvious or otherwise unmeritorious inventions--in part because overworked patent examiners don't have ready access to information about what's already out there.
A yearlong pilot project, endorsed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in partnership with the New York Law School, is supposed to help.
The goal behind the Peer to Patent Project, officially launched last Friday, is to allow anyone who's interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to one of the more difficult categories to decipher: that including computer architecture, software and information security.
The project's Web site provides forums for discussing applications and tools for researching and sharing "prior art" references--that is, evidence that an invention already exists. It then allows for the top 10 of those references to be forwarded on to the Patent Office.
Right now, five applications from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Red Hat are available for review. A number of other firms, including CA, General Electric, Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo, have also put in requests to participate.
Involvement in the project comes with some perks: Instead of having to deal with the average four-year waiting period to get a patent application reviewed, the applications selected to participate can essentially butt ahead in line and get turned around in one year, according to the project's organizers.
An idea resembling the Patent Office-sanctioned project has also cropped up in the form of a site called WikiPatents.com, which was launched last summer by a patent lawyer based in Salt Lake City. The United Kingdom is reportedly considering a similar approach.
Creationists are adapting another element of the traditional scientific realm to their cause: the peer-reviewed journal.
The Institute for Creation Research, a prominent believer that the scientific method can validate a literal reading of the Bible's account of the creation of the universe, Earth and humanity, has begun soliciting papers for the International Journal for Creation Research.
Peer review, in which a scientist's paper is scrutinized by a group of colleagues, is designed to find errors and weed out half-baked ideas. And although some have criticized peer review for rejecting new ideas just because they're too radical for the establishment to stomach, in the long run, science has marched along through various paradigm shifts.
The IJCR, though, has a few extra requirements to make sure scientific findings stay subordinate to creationist tenets.
"IJCR provides scientists and students hard data based on cutting-edge research that demonstrates the young earth model, the global flood, the nonevolutionary origin of the species, and other evidences that correlate to the biblical accounts," according to the institute's description.
In the call for papers, it adds, "Papers can be in any scientific, or social scientific, field, but must be from a young-earth perspective and aim to assist the development of the creation model of origins." And the three or more people who reviewer each paper are advised that each paper must "provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatico-historical/normative interpretation of scripture."
(Via Bad Astronomy)
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