Product Overview of Lens.org
Lens.org is a comprehensive, free, and open resource designed to facilitate the discovery, analysis, management, and sharing of patent and scholarly data on a global scale. Developed by the social enterprise Cambia, Lens.org is a flagship project that has been in development for over 20 years, supported by prominent philanthropic organizations.
Core Functionality
- Data Aggregation: Lens.org aggregates metadata and full text from diverse content sets, including scholarly works, patents, and biological sequences. It ingests, cleans, aggregates, normalizes, and serves over 272 million scholarly works, 155 million global patent records, and more than 495 million patent sequences.
- Search and Analysis Tools: The platform offers advanced search capabilities, including boolean functions, structured search, biological search, classification search, filtering, and sorting options. Users can search millions of scholarly records and patent documents, and facet or filter results by granular metadata.
Key Features
- Discovery Tools:
- Users can search and analyze both patent and scholarly literature with citation indexing. The platform allows reversible links between patent search results and cited scholarly works, and vice versa.
- The “Scholarly Works” section compiles and harmonizes data from sources like Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and Crossref, enhanced with UnPaywall open access information.
- Patent Search:
- Advanced patent search features include biological search, classification search, and filtering options to identify relevant patents. The PatSeq tool allows users to search and analyze biological sequences disclosed in patents.
- Analytics and Visualization:
- The platform provides robust analytics tools, including data visualization features that help in understanding bibliographic data, such as graphs showing publishing counts and word clouds highlighting frequently mentioned technologies.
- Management Tools:
- Users can dynamically track, monitor, and analyze collections of works or patents. The platform also offers tools for managing and ranking data, which can be particularly useful for institutional effectiveness.
- APIs and Bulk Data Access:
- Lens.org provides APIs for accessing scholarly works and patent records, along with options for bulk data downloads of genetic sequences in patents and the corpus of scholarly works and patents. This facilitates customized datasets and institutional use.
- User Profiles and ORCID Integration:
- The platform supports ORCID linked services, allowing users to claim and sync their works with their ORCID records. Composite author/inventor profiles are also available, enhancing transparency and enabling open innovation strategies.
Accessibility and Collaboration
- Open Access: Lens.org is free and open to anyone in the world. Users can access and export all data anonymously, without the need for individual account registration.
- Open Source Software: The platform is built on open-source software, although the codebase is not yet publicly available due to resource constraints.
- Collaborations: Lens.org collaborates with various organizations such as MIT Knowledge Futures Group, Boston University, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and supports initiatives like the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) and the Research Organization Registry (ROR).
User Experience
- User-Friendly Interface: The platform offers a user-friendly interface with a search bar on the homepage, structured search options, and faceted filters to refine search results. Tutorials and search tips are available to help users optimize their searches.
In summary, Lens.org is a powerful tool for researchers, inventors, and institutions to discover, analyze, and manage vast amounts of patent and scholarly data, promoting equitable access to knowledge and facilitating effective problem-solving on a global scale.