USPTO maintains a comprehensive open-access database of all patents filed in USA. Once a patent is abandoned or expires, it becomes part of the global commons. Anybody can use this knowledge to further advance their research, experimentation, product development, and develop new innovations.

To encourage the new innovators, entrepreneurs, start-ups, students, and researchers, The Honey Bee Network has developed open-access databases of people’s knowledge and innovations ( www.honeybee.org ), as well as that of the engineering students (www.techpedia.in), with over 200,000 projects done by over 600,000 students. GIAN, SRISTI, and the HBN aspire to be the world’s largest open-access innovation database providers to promote the culture of caring, sharing, and daring to address the unmet needs of our society. If you wish to support this work and join hands in translating these databases into local languages, please contact us at anilg@gian.org, anamika@gian.org .

We cross-checked all the patents from Google Patents, and from the patent number thus obtained, we used REST APIs to query from USPTO and get all the details. This double-checking ensured that the patents are mapped correctly. The data obtained from USPTO was in a JSON format and not user-friendly, so we converted all the raw data to an easily usable Excel format. The findings suggested that the majority of the patents get abandoned because the patentee did not pay the required amount to maintain the patent. However, the technology hadn’t become obsolete. We want to make such patents easily accessible to make it useful to the inventors.

The database contains the patent number, the reason for abandoning patents, the date of grant of patents as well as the WIPO classification number, so that a user could search for the patents related to her/his field, besides other details. We want to expand the project to include such abandoned patents from other countries as well to make a rich database of recent usable technologies which can be readily accessible to every entrepreneur, start-up, and student/scholar worldwide.

The APIs and the database collection and storage was done by Devika Kaushal and Zaigham Khan, alumni of IIM Nagpur, under the guidance and support of Prof Anil Gupta (CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow, Academy Professor, AcSIR, Visiting Faculty, IIMA and IITB, Founder, Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, GIAN and NIF).

No copyright violation is intended. This effort is entirely driven by public interest and is intended to expand the public domain for making the culture of open science and technology popular for the larger social good. NO liability is entertained for any inadvertent mistake in the database.