Assistance to development of national intellectual property systems of countries, parties to the Eurasian Patent Convention has always been one of the priorities in the development of the Eurasian Patent Organization. New times pose to the states and their national patent offices new, more ambitious tasks in transition to innovation economy. Eurasian Patent Organization and Eurasian Patent Office do not remain aloof from solving these important tasks for national economies. Aiming to make its contribution into innovative development of EAPO member-states, the Office is broadening its cooperation with national patent offices, moving from direct assistance to development of national patent offices to assistance to innovative development of EAPO member-states’ economies.

One of the elements of innovative development is providing access to world information resources. Their use creates an objective scientific picture, becomes an increasingly important source of new inventions, information support to ensure their competitiveness, economic and other strategic interests of developers and manufacturers at the early stages of innovative activity.

Responding to the needs of EAPO member-states, in 2011 EAPO launched a new initiative – to provide a free, without payment, access to EAPATIS – EAPO patent information system, for Academies of sciences and their branches, public libraries, universities and scientific and technical centers of EAPO member-states. According to this initiative and on the basis of bilateral agreements between EAPO and national patent offices, the mentioned above users will have a free access to all EAPATIS search services, full texts of descriptions to national and Eurasian patent documents, as well as a virtual access to full descriptions to inventions of PCT minimum countries from external sources. In fact, they will receive an access to over 38 million of patent documents practically within the same scope as provided previously only to patent examiners from EAPO member-states.

The new initiative was supported at the 24th and 25th meeting of the EAPO Administrative Council and is already being realized.

The 1st signing of an agreement on provision of access to the Eurasian patent information system to public libraries, institutions of higher education and scientific and technical centers between EAPO and the National Intellectual Property Center of the State Committee on Science and Technologies of the Republic of Belarus took place on September 9, 2011 in the National Library of the Republic of Belarus.

On November 17, 2011 a similar agreement was signed in Moscow with the State Intellectual Property Service of the Kyrgyz Republic.

On November 18, 2011 in Moscow EAPO signed the agreement with the Patent Department of the Ministry of Economy and Development of Turkmenistan.