China is going to make patent data open to the general public. "This is our first try in this regard," said Gan Shaoning, Deputy Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, in a press conference. He continued that a pilot platform on patent data launched by the SIPO would allow the public to access at free all the patent documents and their updates archived by intellectual property offices of China, the United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea. According to statistics, the open patent data accounted for about 80% of the total global data.

Gan pointed out that the open data enabled innovators to learn the latest initiatives in research and industry sectors, and on the other hand, could enhance the supervision on patent reviewing process by the public so as to increase the transparency and accountability.

(Source: IPR in China)