“PatentsView is a prototype patent data visualization and analysis platform intended to increase the value, utility, and transparency of US patent data. The initiative is supported by the Office of Chief Economist in the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), with additional support from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The PatentsView initiative was established in 2012 and is a collaboration between USPTO, USDA, the Center for the Science of Science and Innovation Policy, the University of California at Berkeley, Twin Arch Technologies, and Periscopic. The PatentsView platform is built on a newly developed database that longitudinally links inventors, their organizations, locations, and overall patenting activity. The platform uses data derived from USPTO bulk data files. These data are provided for research purposes and do not constitute the official USPTO record. The data visualization tool, query tool, and flexible API enable a broad spectrum of users to examine the dynamics of inventor patenting activity over time and space. They also permit users to explore patent technologies, assignees, citation patterns and co-inventor networks. For researchers in particular, PatentsView is intended to encourage the study and understanding of the intellectual property (IP) and innovation system; to serve as a fundamental function of the government in creating “public good” platforms in these data; and to eliminate the wasteful and redundant cleaning, converting and matching of these data by many individual researchers, thus freeing up researcher time to do what they do best—study IP, innovation, and technological change. This initiative is directly responsive to the President’s open government agenda. In the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, issued on January 21, 2009, the President instructed the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue an Open Government Directive. This directive described the steps that executive agencies should take towards the goal of creating a more open government. Those steps are: 1) publish government information online; 2) improve the quality of government information; 3) create and institutionalize a culture of open government; and 4) create an enabling policy framework for open government. In addition, USDA’s Agricultural Research Services agency has successfully piloted a study to demonstrate the feasibility of using PatentsView data to automatically describe the patenting activity of USDA-supported researchers. USDA administrative data from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Agricultural Research Service, and the US Forest Service have been linked with PatentsView data and can be visualized in the prototype web tool. The current PatentsView platform is a prototype and the team welcomes feedback on data discrepancies.”