On 6 October 2016, the Turkish Patent Institute (TPI) has been appointed as an International Searching Authority (ISA) and International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA) under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) during the 56th series of Meetings of the Assemblies of the Member States of WIPO.
The minimum requirements for an Office to act as an ISA as follows:
The national Office must have at least 100 full-time employees with sufficient technical qualifications to carry out searches;
The Office must have in its possession, or have access to, at least the minimum documentation referred to in PCT Rule 34, properly arranged for search purposes, on paper, in microform or stored on electronic media;
The Office must have a staff which is capable of searching the required technical fields and which has the language facilities to understand at least those languages in which the minimum documentation referred to in Rule 34 is written or is translated;
The Office must have in place a quality management system and internal review arrangements in accordance with the common rules of international search.
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