A patent search center established by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) will begin operations formally in early April 2012. The center will help the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) perform the prior art search work. It can be expected that the workload of the patent examiners will accordingly be reduced and the examination speed will be faster.

The TIPO studied the systems in the patent offices of Japan and Korea, which entrust the patent prior art search and classification work to outside institutes, and concluded that such a center in Taiwan would be beneficial to the application process. In terms of the work involved in a single case of patent examination, approximately half the time can be saved, so the efficiency of patent examination can be increased significantly.

The first chairperson of the center will be Ms. Mei-hua Wang who is the currentDirector General of TIPO. The center plans to gradually expand the operation scale and throughput. A trial period will run from April to December 2012, and 25 people having patent or industrial practice have been recruited to perform the prior art search work. In the second and third years, the personnel will be increased to 54 and 58 people respectively, and the throughput is expected to increase from 1,500 cases to 5,600 and 8,000 cases accordingly.

The establishment of the center is one of the measures proposed by the TIPO to reduce the backlog of pending patent applications. It is estimated that the number of pending patent applications can be decreased to 78,000 cases through those measures by 2016, and the average pendency per case will be decreased to less than 24 months. After the goal of helping the TIPO to reduce the backlog has been accomplished, the center will provide its accumulated patent search information to the industry, government and academic circles for the purposes of research and development or policy formulation to make the environment of intellectual property protection sounder.