Subject to the successful conclusion of a third and final pilot, begun on 1 July 2018 (details in next section of this report), it is hoped that, in a few years’ time, all PCT applicants will be offered a procedural option providing for –

one of the IP5 offices (European, US, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) to act as a “main ISA” leading a collaborative exercise, the result of which will be that the main ISA issues a search report and written opinion in Chapter I based on both its own work and on inputs from the other four offices (called “peer ISAs”).

Such a collaborative exercise is currently officially called “collaborative search and examination (CS&E)”; but to avoid possible confusion with other initiatives (and possible future renaming), in this report the exercise will be called “PCT-IP5 search”.