Relevant Prior Art (RPA) Services

The USPTO has a requirement to capture prior art documents and automatically map citations to the application documents. Prior art documents are listed on the PTO/SB/08 (A and B) forms and Notice of References Cited (PTO-892). These prior art documents are submitted on various forms and in a variety of formats. The documents cited on an IDS or 892 are U.S. Patents, foreign patents, and NPL documents. The submissions include an image and citation document for a prior art entry.

The USPTO is seeking to utilize the best electronic resources to provide Patent Examiners with information from an applicant’s other applications as early as possible. This would increase the efficiency of Patent Examiners and also reduce the burden on patent applicants. Relevant Prior Art (RPA) provides an automated tool for Patent Examiners to have the ability to view a master reference list including documents cited in the instant application and imported documents from the immediate U.S. parent application. The USPTO currently uses an in-house manual application to complete this process. This manual process is inefficient and therefore does not fully meet a Patent Examiners needs to be able to process patent applications timely and thoroughly.

This requirement will be solicited as a total small business set aside and the solicitation is expected to be posted to Contract Opportunities on or before July 31, 2023.