The pilot project began on June 15 last year and was designed to help US patent examiners to assess applications for software patents by encouraging the public to submit relevant prior art.

Mark Webbink, executive director of the Center for Patent Innovations at the New York Law School, who was also one of the authors of the report , said it revealed some pleasing statistics.

“The level of users was very satisfying. The sheer volume of prior art that was being generated showed that people were actively engaging in the pilot. We were very happy to get a good response from people outside of the US like the UK, Canada, Europe and even in Japan. It was good to know that people outside of the US were paying attention to this development,” he said.

The report found that an open network of reviewers can improve the quality of information available to patent examiners and that such citizen-reviewers are capable of producing information relevant to the patent examination process and are willing to volunteer time.

Peer-to-patent attracted more than 2,000 peer reviewers and on average citizen-reviewers contributed six hours reviewing each patent application in the pilot

Beth Simone Noveck from the New York Law School, who helped launched the project with the USPTO, said: “As the first example of harnessing public knowledge to improve a government process, the first year of peer-to-patent was an unquestioned success.”

“While the impact of this project on patent quality will take longer to assess, the early indications are certainly promising,” she added.

The average number of prior art submissions on peer-to-patent applications was 2,000 times that of standard rule-based submissions, according to the report.

Manny Schecter, associate general counsel for IP law at IBM, has supported the project. He emphasized the strong prior art that was collected, especially the non-patent prior art that patent examiners made use of through the pilot.

He told Managing IP : “The pilot has exceeded our expectations. The results have been outstanding and it has helped to validate the concept of the pilot we had envisioned.”

However, those behind the pilot admitted that they had hoped to bring in more fresh applications, and they expect to improve upon that next year.

“In terms of the applicants there were not many and we didn’t use all the available slots so that is mildly disappointing,” said Webbink.

Webbink added that the feedback received indicated that people are happy to participate. “For us the ease of use of the system is of paramount importance. And patent examiners were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. It was also a very fascinating experience for students,” he said.

In its first year companies such as Red Hat, Cisco, Yahoo!, IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and GE all submitted patent applications to the peer-to-patent process.

But there remain some critics. Jeffrey Guise, a partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, said: “Although having expert input can be helpful, programmes like the peer-to-patent review just add an additional process and an additional person, which slows things down even further".

The project is about to start its second year and the organizers are hoping to expand it so that it will include not only computer and software-related patents but also class 705 patents, which relate to business methods.

Kaz Kazenske, senior director of legal and corporate affairs at Microsoft and who is also on the steering committee of the peer-to-patent project, said that for the next pilot he would like to see a “greater degree of discussion among patent offices on integrating the various pilot programmes”.

“We would like to see it applied to a wider range of technologies, and to accommodate that wider range, it would make sense to begin looking at enhancing patent system infrastructure,” he added.

For the next year Webbink said that there will not be any major changes to the programme, just some “continued tweaking”.

“We are also in late-stage discussions with the UK Intellectual Property Office and hopefully they will also have a peer-to-patent pilot set up sometime this year,” he added.

Kazenske did however say that there are two factors that remain to be addressed. “Can the USPTO integrate the programme into the examination process across all technologies and to all 5000 plus examiners? And, is the program capable of large-scale expansion in the US where approximately 5000 applications are published every week, and to the global patent system? We might not have those answers yet, but they are certainly worth pursuing.”