As a participant office of the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH), IP Australia is now joining the PPH eXtra Initiative to give patent applicants and their representatives clearer information about examination timeframes for PPH requests.
What is the PPH?
The PPH is a global fast-track that allows patent applicants to request accelerated assessment in Australia by considering examination work from another participating intellectual property (IP) office that has already found at least one allowable claim.
What does the PPH eXtra Initiative do?
PPH eXtra builds on the existing PPH framework by improving transparency and predictability around examination timeframes for PPH requests.
Under the initiative, participating offices commit to publishing target timeframes for PPH applications and the time taken to issue:
- first examination reports
- follow-up examination actions.
This information will be reported and published annually, offering greater visibility of how the PPH pathway operates across different international jurisdictions.
Access to comparable information about examination timeframes helps applicants make more informed decisions when planning international patent strategies and managing expectations across jurisdictions.
Which countries are participating?
Participating offices include Australia, Austria, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Finland and the United States.
PPH eXtra is designed to improve transparency and predictability for applicants using the PPH Pathway.