Standards and recommendations

Standards in the field of industrial law information are documents of a normative nature, which regulate the rules and rules for the indication of data on industrial property objects by the competent authorities, but also, for example, the form and particulars of patent or utility model application documents filed by applicants or patent agents.

Standards with international validity are issued by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), and are therefore also known as WIPO standards. They are referred to by the abbreviation ST (or WIPO ST) and the serial number of the standard. Some are based on international standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

For example, WIPO standards regulate the form of patent documents issued by patent offices, the rules for the inclusion of bibliographic data in bulletins, databases and patent documents, the structure of bulletins, etc. They specify requirements for the adaptation of the documents supporting patent or utility model applications filed by applicants or their attorneys to facilitate their processing, e.g. scanning and automated post-filing processing at the offices.

The Industrial Property Office uses WIPO standards in the Bulletin, in databases on the Internet, in issued patent documents and in other official Office outputs. Knowledge of the current version of the WIPO standards can help users of industrial law information when working with patent documents, conducting searches, working with databases, etc., to better understand the information disclosed in relation to industrial rights subject matter. For example, the ST.22 standard is partially implemented in the Office's instructions to applicants for patent and utility model applications.

A list of the most widely used WIPO standards is given in the table below. 

Standard	Short translation of the title	Implementation in IPO SK
ST.1	Minimum elements in the data to uniquely identify the patent document	implemented in patent documents
ST.3	Two-letter code designations of countries and international organisations	available in IPO SK journal
ST.6	Numbering of published patent documents	implemented upon receiving applications
ST.9	Bibliographic data of patents (utility models) and supplementary protection certificates	implemented in patent documents
ST.13	Numbering of applications for all types of industrial property	implemented in patent documents
ST.16	Codes for patent document types	implemented in patent documents
ST.17	Header codes of notices in the Official Gazettes	available in IPO SK journal
ST.22	Editing patent applications (utility model applications) into optical character recognition (OCR) format	Instruction of the IPO SK (patents), instruction of the IPO SK (utility designs)
ST.60	Bibliographic data of trade marks	implemented in IPO SK journal and webregister
ST.80	Bibliographic data of designs	implemented in IPO SK journal and webregister

The current standards in authentic English, French and Spanish are available in the WIPO Handbook on Industrial Property Information and Documentation.

The development, revision and adoption of WIPO standards is carried out by the Committee on WIPO Standards (abbreviated as CWS), whose members include WIPO Member States as well as those Member States of the Paris Union and the Berne Union that are not members of WIPO. 

The use of WIPO standards by the relevant authorities contributes to the harmonization of practices related to the processing of data in the application process, facilitates international cooperation in the standardization of industrial law information and documentation and enables international exchange.