The University of Cambridge is now joining with institutions worldwide in supporting The Lens, a unique resource providing discovery and analytics tools to analyze and manage patent and scholarly data with the aim of breaking down silos to enable inclusive problem solving for the public good. Cambridge University Libraries is delighted to be the first institution in the UK to support The Lens, and looks forward to developing its use of the The Lens Institutional Toolkit from 2022.
The Lens “serves linked open knowledge artefacts and metadata with tools to inform effective, efficient and equitable problem solving.” Cambridge is fully behind The Lens mission:
“Virtually all problem solving requires discovery, coordination and incentivization of multiple partners. This in turn requires building bridges between domains of expertise, and even domains of culture and norms. The Lens is the main project for a social enterprise focused on changing the global problem solving capability through a long-game strategy that includes creating a platform serving linked open knowledge artefacts and open metadata that can inform problem solving by a community vastly larger and more inclusive than just one single group be it scholars or academia or lawyers and businesses.”
Members of the University can take advantage now of the benefits of our institutional subscription. This includes the availability to yourselves of an API plan that comes in two versions, the “Institutional User Scholarly API Plan” and the “Institutional User Patent API Plan”.
These plans provide you with your own volume of requests and quotas (for more information see here).
To obtain access to one of these plans, you should first create a personal account on The Lens. For instructions on how to create an account see here.
You should use your University email address (@cam.ac.uk) when you create your account. Next, send an email message to ejournals@lib.cam.ac.uk with the following text:
- I confirm that I have created an account with @cam email address on The Lens
- I request the Institutional User Scholarly API Plan [or] the Institutional User Patent API Plan
Your request will be processed, and you will receive a confirmation directly from The Lens that your account has been credited with the plan you requested.
To support your use of The Lens and inform and advise you on the diverse sources available to you in the area of patents The Department of Engineering Library has created a new LibGuide specifically on Patents.
The Lens can be accessed directly here and is listed in the Cambridge University Libraries A-Z of E-resources.
Electronic Collection Management 