Information sources on post-grant actions to pharmaceutical patents

Over the past two decades, many industrialized countries have implemented changes in their patent laws to provide an extended period of protection for commercially marketed pharmaceuticals. The process has been adopted piecemeal, using widely different procedures. The information sources relating to such term extension are consequently scattered and poorly organized, compared with conventional patent legal status data. This paper reviews the legal processes behind term extension and provides a survey of the key principles and information sources available.