Bits and pieces

JIPLP has just welcomed a new team member -- Danielle Northcott, who joins us as a Publishing Assistant. Danielle has two pieces of fresh news for subscribers:

1. A new QuickSearch widget is going to be provided at the top of column three on the contents page (which currently looks like this). This widget will enable users quickly to enter a search rather than having to click through to the "Search this journal" facility on the journal's homepage (here) [there's no truth in the rumour that this is to renamed SlowSearch -- it's still pretty nippy!]. The QuickSearch widget is a usability improvement which will make it significantly easier for users to run a search on the site. At present, approximately 5% of users perform a search; Oxford University Press will be monitoring the impact of the QuickSearch widget in terms of increased search usage. This change will be automatically implemented on 1 September.
   
2. A "Most Read and Most Cited" widget will be added to the bottom of column three of JIPLP's content pages. This, as its name suggests, will afford users quick access to the most read and most cited articles. This innovation will also be automatically implemented on 1 September.

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Here are some more articles in search of authors.  If you'd like to write on one of these topics, email Content Commissioning Editor Sarah Harris at sarah.harris@oup.com and let her know.  Guidance for authors can be found on the JIPLP website here.

• "Fluid trade marks": what are they and how best can they be protected?
• How can internet service providers fashion a simple, effective and user-friendly intellectual property policy?
• A summary of the current position regarding evidence of genuine use of an earlier trade mark in European law
• Injunctive relief for patent infringement in the Unitef States post-eBay v MercEchange: how much has changed?
• Disposing of databases: due diligence and other practical issues.

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Here are some writing errors that I've been having to deal with quite a lot recently.  Do please try to avoid them: they're usually easy to spot if you re-read your articles and Current Intelligence notes before you submit them:

1. Slipping between the past and the present tense: please do this only if you are contrasting things that happened in the past with things that are still happening. Also, descriptions of the facts of cases should not be written in the historical present.  It is odd to read "The plaintiff is the owner of the BINGO trade mark, under which it manufactures and markets widgets" when the trade mark was cancelled in 2005 and the plaintiff ceased trading in 2007.

2. Inconsistency between singular and plural.  This problem particularly plagues nouns that have a collective element to their meaning, for example, 'company', 'committee', 'government', 'collecting society".  It is not uncommon to receive sentences that run like this:

"The company were seeking to register as a Community trade mark the sign which it was using on both domestically-manufactured products they were making and those it imported from a manufacturer outside the European Union".

3. Do please remember that not every reader is on the writer's wavelength.  I recently received a submission for publication of a Current Intelligence note on a court concerning the validity of a patent which didn't actually contain the word "patent" anywhere: the writer assumed that the reader would know. While the assumption was probably quite correct in this case, a little assistance from the author is often welcome since validity is an issue that affects other rights as well.  Equally, it helps to let the reader know which jurisdiction you're writing about (British authors are generally the worst offenders on this point!)