Ever since 1984, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) has been pursuing its "Paperless Office" plan and in 1990 was the first patent office in the world to accept online filings for patent and utility model applications. In the years that followed, the JPO also succeeded in offering fully online processes for design and trade mark applications, as well as appeal proceedings and international applications. The move towards e-government in Japan in more recent years led to the JPO to issue its draft "Business & System Optimisation Plan", this August. The JPO now invites public comments on the draft, which is available on the internet. The plan takes into account the JPO's need to perform speedy and top-quality patent examination as well as the importance of patent information in industry's and academia's research and business strategy planning. In view of the increasing flood of information, the JPO's plan aims at creating a "smarter and leaner" search system as well as reducing operating costs. Quoting WIPO's Patent Report 2007, the plan acknowledges the growing importance of Chinese and Korean patent data and foresees multi-lingual translation functions for improving access to non-English data in order to foster a global approach to patent information.

According to the time schedule published in the draft, the redesign of the JPO's search systems (including the public services) is expected to be completed in 2013/2014.

The JPO's draft "Business & System Optimisation Plan" is available at: http://www.jpo.go.jp/cgi/link.cgi?url=/iken/iken_systemsaitekika.htm (Japanese only)