The Lens

The Lens (formerly Patent Lens) is a free, public and open service, which allows users to search, analyse, collect, save and share patent documents. Its core functionality includes faceted searching and graphical analysis of over 100 million patent documents, which are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data. Each document can be annotated, aggregated into collections and shared openly. The WIPO Manual on Open Source Patent Analytics "reviews the ever growing number of open source and free software tools that are available for different steps in the patent analytics process" such as the WIPO Patentscope, Espacenet, Google Patents and many others, and devotes Chapter 6 entirely to the Lens. The Lens project attracted funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 1999 Cambia commenced work to render the global patent system more transparent. Cambia and The Lens were founded by Richard Anthony Jefferson, a molecular biologist and social entrepreneur, who developed the reporter gene system GUS. Professor Jefferson pioneered Biological Open Source and at present is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The Lens is US-registered, Australian-owned, public benefit, not-for-profit organisation, jointly owned by Cambia and Queensland University of Technology. It operates largely from Brisbane, Australia, with offices at the Queensland University of Technology, and from Canberra, Australia. In order to create effective new tools and platforms for researchers, scholars, inventors, investors and policy makers the Lens draws on reciprocal linkages with open public projects, such as PubMed, Crossref and ORCID. The Lens features smart tools to track, analyse and visualise research.

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