GL B VII 1.2.1 General

The payment of these fees must take place within a period of two months (Rule 64(1)). If the automatic debiting procedure is being used for the application, applicants must inform the EPO within this period if they do not want all or any of the further inventions to be searched.

GL B VII 1.2 Invitation to pay further search fees

The search division will inform the applicant of the lack of unity of invention in a communication accompanying the partial search report and will indicate that a further search fee must be paid for each invention other than the one first mentioned in the claims, if the search is to cover these inventions as well.

GL B VII 1.1 Partial European search report

If the search division considers that the European application does not comply with the requirement of unity of invention (see F‑V, 1), it must search it, and draw up the partial European search report under Rule 64(1), for those parts of the application which relate to the invention (or group of inventions forming unity) first mentioned in the claims (see F‑V, 3.4).

GL B VII 1 General remarks

The requirement of unity of invention serves a regulatory function in the interest of an efficient procedure up to grant (T 110/82 and F‑V, 6). It would be unfair to regard as having unity of invention those applications which, because of their heterogeneous content, entail a far greater than average expense to process, especially in respect of search, since this expense must partly be borne by the fees levied for other applications.

GL B VII – Unity of invention

1. General remarks

2. Procedures in cases of lack of unity

3. Lack of unity and Rule 62a or Rule 63

GL B VI 7 Internet disclosures - technical journals

For some technical journals, the publisher's website displays the date(s) when publications occur electronically, in particular if these differ from the publication dates of paper publications (OJ EPO 2009, 456). A number of different situations may occur in the case of electronic publication, as described in G‑IV, 7.5.3.1.

GL B VI 6.5 Incorrect compound records in online databases

If the search division retrieves a compound when interrogating a database created by abstracting source documents (e.g. patents, journal articles or books) and deriving the chemical compounds disclosed in those documents and, on reading the source document, is unable to locate the compound, this does not automatically mean that an error has been made and that the compound is not disclosed in the document. For example, disclosed compounds which are named but whose structures are not drawn are still part of the disclosure and will be abstracted.

GL B VI 6.4 Insufficient prior-art disclosures

In general, the search division assumes that any technical subject-matter present in a prior-art document is sufficiently disclosed and consequently is part of the state of the art. Even in cases of doubt the document is cited in the search report in the normal way and relied upon for an appropriate objection in the search opinion. Only in clear cases of insufficient disclosure (see G‑IV, 2) will such a document be discarded.

GL B VI 6.3 Conflict between abstract and source document

Where there is a problem with an abstract, either because it appears to conflict with the source document to which it relates or because it conflicts with other abstracts of the same source document, the search division will proceed as follows:

(i)where the source document is in an accessible language (in particular a language of an EPC contracting state) and either is directly available to the search division or may be ordered,

GL B VI 6.2 Citation of documents corresponding to documents not available or not published in one of the official EPO languages

Under certain circumstances a document whose contents have not been verified may be cited, provided there is justification for the assumption that there is identity of content with another document which the search division has inspected; both documents are then mentioned in the search report in the manner indicated at the end of B‑X, 9.1.2.