Examiner Searching The principal operational assumptions underlying the functional area of Examiner Searching, the process in which the patent examiner searches prior art relevant to an application to determine its patentability, are: Non-APS Alternative To ensure that documents are available when required, the current practice of examiners removing documents for study at their desks is stopped. If an examiner wishes to take a document to his or her desk for study, it is copied by a copy service in each file room. The document is refled as soon as possible after copying. The number of copies needed is projected at a constant number of U.S., foreign and non-patent literature documents per application searched. Photocopy costs are shown in this portion of the model. Refle costs are shown in the File Management spreadsheet. APS Alternative The copying service is not instituted. Instead. the group printers All this need, and copy materials are projected initially at the same level as for the non-APS alternative. Once deployment to the desktop examining environment is complete, the need for individual study copies is shown phasing down over a period of three years to a residual fraction of the original need. Many Classified Search and Image Retrieval development costs have already been incurred. These are considered unrecoverable costs and are not shown in the model. The remaining development and deployment costs are shown. Following full deployment, contractor costs for continued maintenance and enhancement are shown for the full 20-year period. Differential costs for examining cluster construction are developed for each cluster needed in the year in which it would be built. Space is rented for the clusters for as long as they are needed. Costs for demolition are not developed. Page 23 Application Process Management The functional area of Application Process Management includes those processes and systems required to handle the application document from its receipt. through examination and postexamination processing, and to prepare it for publication. This section of the model assumes that the operational offsets provided by the Patent Application Management (PAM) system are sufficient to pay for the capture in electronic form of the original application and all amendments. This in turn allows the PTO to eliminate the costs of the data capture contract for preparing the photocomposition tape for issued patents. The model includes the costs to develop and implement PAM and the costs for the data capture contract, but does not develop in detail the other offsets to operating expenses in the application management area. Non-APS Alternative Projects data entry contract costs to prepare the Government Printing Office photocomposition tape, and other associated costs. for the full 20-year period. APS Alternative Phases out the current means of data capture and associated costs beginning in Fiscal Year 1995. Costs are substantially eliminated beginning in Fiscal Year 1996. PAM development, implementation and maintenance costs are projected for the full 20-year period. Dissemination The model projects demand only for patent copy sales, self-help photocopying, and deployment of image workstations in the Public Search Room. The more significant benefits of dissemination beyond these means, however, are not developed in detail and costs are not estimated. They are discussed in general terms in the conclusions of this report as potential benefits of the APS alternative. The motivation for not explicitly including them in the detailed analysis is the almost complete dependence on highly variable factors that cannot be estimated easily--e.g.. volume of public demand for specific products, availability of adequate private sector products and services, etc. This omission is conservative in that (a) it disfavors the APS alternative which has the far greater potential to meet the PTO mission requirements in this area and (b) any information dissemination product must be individually cost/beneficial in the large since, because its marginal costs are required to be fully funded by user fees. Non-APS Alternative Separate projections are developed for the three methods of sales: order fulfillment from inventory, order fulfillment by photocopy from microform documents: self-help photocopying, Projected volumes for patent copy sales are divided equally between the first two modalities and are driven by the projected number of new issues, the best metric by which to project these volumes. Unit costing is projected and applied for all three mechanisms. APS Alternative The Patent Copy Sales application high capacity printers replace order fulfillment from inventory and microform. Group printers in the Public Search Room replace the selfhelp photocopy operation. Unit costs are multiplied by projected volumes for the 20year period. Information Systems Infrastructure In addition to the four functional areas just discussed, the model gathers together those expenses relating to the automated components and effort that are required for multiple components of the APS, e.g., the Mainframe Data Center, the hardware data storage components, the special space required. etc. Hardware is shown in a specific functional area if it contributes primarily or exclusively to that area. For example. examiner workstations and cluster rooms are shown in examiner searching. Hardware that supports multiple areas, e.g., storage units, are grouped here in Infrastructure. These are the principal aspects of the Infrastructure model: |