Open Access is often discussed in relation to journal publications, preprints, and data. Yet patents, despite being a crucial part of the innovation ecosystem, remain slightly outside the mainstream conversation on open science infrastructures. While I’ve worked in the past with several open patent repositories, mainly those provided by patent offices, I never actually reflected on how patents are archived, exposed, or made discoverable in global open access platforms such as OpenDOAR.
Given the increasing importance of transparency, reproducibility, and the reuse of technical knowledge, understanding the landscape of open access patent repositories felt relevant not only for my research but also for discussions on knowledge equity and innovation policy.
Sofi, I. A., Sofi, T. A., Mir, A. A., & Bhat, A. (2025). Analysing the current status of open access patent repositories: a global perspective. Information Discovery and Delivery, 53(2), 181-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-05-2023-0043
The quiet side of Open Access:
The authors open by contextualising the role of Open Access (OA) repositories as enables of academic communication and knowledge dissemination. As highlighted in the paper, repositories add value beyond simple storage: they use metadata, structured organisation, and curation to make scholarly outputs discoverable and reusable.
However, while journal articles and theses dominate these repositories, patentes receive far less attention. Previous studies cited in the paper show that although Asia and Europe have seen strong growth in OA repositories, patents consistently appear as one of the least archived content types (e.g., studies by Ganaie et al., Ibrahim & Beigh, and Doris & Ekereuche).
This gap motivates the study: to provide the first global overview of how patents are being archived in OA repositories listed in OpenDOAR.
The Method:
The researchers used OpenDOAR as the sole data source, selecting it because of its quality assurance mechanisms and international adoption.
Data extraction occurred on 28 March 2023, using the advanced search function to filter by content type (“Patents”). This initial search yielded 253 repositories.
The team then combined the content type filter with other parameters:
- Country
- Repository Type:
- Institutional: created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution accesible to everybody.
- Disciplinary: or Subject-Based, specific to a particular scientific discipline.
- Governmental: when they are established and managed by governmental organizations.
- Aggregating: aggregate content from various platforms.
- Research: backed by research funders to capture and distribute research outcomes.
- Software Platform
- Subject Coverage
Other characteristics, such as Web 2.0 integration, open access policies, OAI-PMH compliance, and interface language, were checked manually via each repository’s profile.
The results were stored in Excel, with charts and tables presented throughout the article.
Key Findings:
- The number of repositories archiving patents has grown steadily since OpenDOAR’s launch. The peak year was 2022 with 44 repos (17.4%).
- There are 48 contributing countries, but the landscape is uneven, reflecting both differing national strategies and varying degrees of OA maturity.
- United Kingdom leads with 43 repositories (17%)
- Followed by China (30, 11%), France (18, 7.1%), and Korea (16%, 6.3%). Spain ranks 6th (10, 4%).
- Many countries contribute only one or two repositories.
- Institutional repositories dominate overwhelmingly (95.6%).
- This indicates that patent archiving is mostly a university-driven activity.
- Multidisciplinary repositories account for 90.5%. This makes sense, patents cut across many domains and are mainly published in institutional repositories.
- The long-standing dominance of DSpace in the OA ecosystem extends to patent repositories (42.3%), followed by EPrints (19.4%), PURE (7.9%), and HAL (6.7%).
- 31.6% of repositories do not use Web 2.0 tools. This lack of modern dissemination tools may affect the visibility of patent collections.
- Only 27.3% of repositorioes follow at least one OA policy, the majority have no explicit policies at all.
- 75.5% of repositories support OAI-PMH, indicating relatively strong interoperability with harvesting systems.
- Most repositories use English (57.3%) or multilingual interfaces (37.15%).
Limitations & What’s left to explore:
The authors ackwnoeledge two main limitations:
- The study uses only OpenDOAR as a data source, other registries might paint a more nuanced picture.
- The analysis includes only repositories explicitly listing “Patents” as a content type, possible excluding mixed-content repositories where patents appear but aren’t indexed as such.
These constraints mean the finding offer a strong but not fully exhaustive snapshot.
Conclusions:
The paper positions itself as the first global study to characterise open access patent repositories. The authors conclude that despite positive growth, significant room for improvement remains, especially regarding:
- Clearer open access policies
- Greater uptake of Web 2.0 tools
- More consistent interface and metadata practices
- Enhanced promotion and visibility of patent records.
The paper’s recommendations include encouraging repositories to make better use of social media, academic networks, and interoperable standards to support patent discoverability.
This paper has clarified something for me: while patents exist at the intersection of innovation, legal protection, and public knowledge, their visibility and accessibility remain inconsistent worldwide. I believe open access isn’t just about research papers, it should extend to every piece of knowledge that drives discovery, patents included.
See you in the next paper =)