The USPTO has thus far remained quite firm with its stated plan to shut down PAIR and EFS-Web on November 8. This will surely lead to a lot of people suddenly using Patent Center for the first time starting on November 8. There will also surely be some fraction of USPTO customers who until now have been using Patent Center only rarely (doing most of their work with PAIR and EFS-Web) and who will suddenly find that they must migrate all of their work to Patent Center.
With this in mind, here is the beginning of a list of tips and tricks for users of Patent Center. If you have a contribution for this list, post it to the Patent Center listserv and a volunteer can add it to this list.
- Workaround for filing ST.25 sequence listings. (CO) Just ignore the error message that says you can’t do it, and do it anyway. (From CP153 .)
- Auto-assignment of document descriptions based on file names. (CO, suggested by Orvis PC) If you use a certain file naming convention, Patentcenter will helpfully assign a document description. Here are file naming conventions that work for IDS submissions:
- Non Patent Literature: NPL_filename, filename_NPL, file_NPL_name or NPL-filename, filename-NPL, file-NPL-name.
- Foreign Reference: FOR_filename, filename_FOR or FOR-filename, filename-FOR.
Users have reported other file names are sometimes auto-assigned a description.