# The Lens

The Lens, formerly called Patent Lens, is a free searcheable online patent and scholarly literature database, provided by Cambia, an Australia-based non-profit organization.
The Lens is an agglomeration database, that takes bibliometric data from other databases (such as Crossref, PubMed, Microsoft Academic and Open Alex ) and combines them using analytics to provide additional information.

## History

The service was launched in 2000 as a database of US patents in agricultural fields, and expanded to all the sciences, engineering, and all other fields of patents, and showing the patent application and patent data from multiple jurisdictions, available and searchable on a website named the Patent Lens, in an effort led by Dr. Marie Connett and Dr. Richard Jefferson of Cambia in 2004-2007, which also initiated the addition of software to search the patent literature for biological sequences (see below), and the concept of dynamic updating of patent landscapes in particular fields. Over the years the database has supported free and open searching of the patent literature and production of conference papers, reports, books and other types of scholarly literature, and analytics for updating patent landscapes and uncovering ownership and citation patterns have been steadily improved. The Patent Lens was renamed The Lens in 2013. Funding has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2000–2004, a donation via the International Rice Research Institute 2005-2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2012, Wellcome Trust in 2018, and Lemelson Foundation. The database now contains over 225+ million scholarly works, 127+ million global patent records, and more than 370 million biological sequences.

## Features

The Patent Lens Sequence Project, commenced in June 2006, provides the only public facility to enable users to explore over 80 million DNA and protein sequences disclosed in patents.
Patent tutorials are available on the site covering patent claims, freedom to operate, patent inventorship, and continuing patent applications. Plant breeders' rights (PBR), also known as plant variety rights (PVR), are also addressed. This has the intention to "forge a learning resource that participants in innovation systems at all levels... can use to learn of critical and timely issues relevant to improving the public good... by engaging with the patent system".
The patent search interface is available in Chinese, English and French, with the full text of European Patent Office (EPO) patents being searchable in English, French and German. PCT applications are searchable in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

## Response

The Lens was described in the Journal of the Medical Library Association as the “most comprehensive scholarly literature database, that exceeds in its width and depth two leading commercial databases (Web of Science and Scopus) combined”.
Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in March 2009, stated that the landscaping activities of the Patent Lens: in "view of the shared objective of making patent information systems more comprehensive and accessible, and turning raw patent data into useful information resources so as to strengthen the empirical basis of international policy processes".
Nature Biotechnology called the Patent Lens "a giant leap in the right direction" for providing researchers, technology transfer offices and company executives a facile means of establishing the novelty of their offerings and the nature of their competitors' inventions.