The Government Patent Register: A new resource for measuring U.S. government-funded patenting

Abstract

We introduce new historical administrative data identifying U.S. government-funded patents since the early twentieth century. In addition to the funding agency, the data report whether the government has title to the patent (“title” patents) or funded a patent assigned to a private organization (“license” patents). The data include a large number of “license” patents that cannot be linked to government funding from patent text or other sources. Combining the historical data with modern administrative sources, we present a public, consolidated data series measuring U.S. government-funded patents — including funding agencies — through 2020, and we provide code to extend this series in the future. We use the data to document long-run patterns in U.S. government-funded patents and federal patent policy, propose ways in which these data can be used in future research, and discuss limitations of the data.