The European Patent Office has joined forces with the Russian Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent) and launched a Russian version of its online patent search service esp@cenet.

The launch at the "Patent Information for Innovation" conference in Moscow last week marked the beginning of a joint campaign to promote the use of patent information in Russia.

Participants in the conference stressed the importance of patent information for the innovation process, saying that a simple search in a patent database like esp@cenet can save researchers, particular those working in smaller companies, a lot of time and money.

esp@cenet provides online access to more than 60 million patent documents. In addition to the new Rospatent version, interfaces are available for 30 of the EPO's member states and access points have been established for the Latin American countries (in Spanish and Portuguese) and the Eurasian Patent Office (in Russian).

The EPO has been co-operating with Rospatent in the framework of the CIS and Mongolia project since the 1990s. The two offices signed a Memorandum of Understanding, with a focus on patent information promotion, at a meeting in April this year.

(www.epo.org)