Global Dossier is delivered by IP5, the five largest intellectual property offices in the world, namely the USPTO, the European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), and the National Intellectual Property Administration, PRC (CNIPA). Information in Global Dossier is also available from additional countries through WIPO CASE, including Canada, Australia, and Israel.

The information available via Global Dossier includes search and examination results.  USPTO examiners received access to the dossier information of participating offices as part of the Patent End to End (PE2E) rollout beginning in the spring of 2015. This provides access for users to typically hard to find relevant prior art (especially from Asian offices) early in the examination process.  Such information allows examiners to build on the results from the participating offices to help strengthen the patent record as well as assist in improving overall examination quality. 

Global Dossier was released to the public in November 2015, providing stakeholders with the ability to access the full file history information on a patent application family from the IP5 offices.  In addition to providing the ability to track and manage related applications across the five offices, it lowers translation costs, and in the future, will make it more efficient and less costly to perform basic administrative functions.

On a typical day, Global Dossier services average around 100,000 public accesses and over 13,000 USPTO examiner accesses.

In a typical year, the USPTO receives over 3 million requests for data from examiners in other IP5 offices via Global Dossier services.

A Global Dossier Task Force (GDTF) was created to ensure that the services developed align with the needs of all stakeholders. It is made up of the IP5 offices, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and IP5 Industry Groups: American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), Business Europe (BE), Japan Intellectual Property Association (JIPA), Korea Intellectual Property Association (KINPA), and Patent Protection Association of China (PPAC).

In January 2015, the first GDTF meeting took place in Suzhou, China, where IP5 Industry identified five short-term priorities for the offices to explore.  There was an agreement among the IP5 that each office would define the scope of a particular topic identified by industry groups as short-term priorities:

• Inter-Office document exchange – sharing of application data between offices, e.g. prior art exchanges, supporting documents, bibliographic data updates, etc.
• Alerting functionality – an automated mechanism that alerts other offices, applicants, and/or representatives when there is a change in the status of an application
• XML document provision – enabling the ability to download application content  in XML format
• Applicant name standardization – an automated mechanism that will assign a single, unique name to entities with applications pending in multiple offices
• Legal status – a mechanism to allow users to view the legal status of an application in another office

The IP5 offices have been working on each of the priorities in consultation and coordination with the GDTF.

The ultimate goal of Global Dossier is to allow for facilitation of preplanned cross-filings; one-portal management of cross-filed applications; elimination of the need to file duplicate documents in multiple offices (e.g., priority documents, prior art citations, etc.); and, other functions allowing for greater stakeholder involvement in application management.

Learn more about USPTO's efforts on the Inter-Office Document Exchange Priority.

Latest updates

February 2018

Enhancements to Citation List

New quick view panel to display abstract and classification for each reference.  Addition of relevancy data (relevancy indication, claims, and relevant sections) for each reference (when available).

Enhancements to Patent Family List

Added functionality of opening dossier in new window.  Additional relevancy data (relevancy indication, claims, and relevant sections) displayed in the citation view (when available) and citation data can be exported in PDF format.

September 2017

Beta release of the Citation List

The Citation List, as part of the USPTO’s ongoing efforts to enhance Global Dossier, is a service that provides a comprehensive listing of relevant citations that are in related applications that share a common priority claim.

February 2017

Enhancements to Global Dossier

Links to foreign patent publications via PatentScope are provided. Users can also view enriched citation data, when available. Further enhancements have also been made to provide additional functionality to Global Dossier.

September 2016

Patent Quality Chat on Future Information Disclosure Practice in a Global Dossier Environment

Video  | Presentation Slides

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