Inventorship is not authorship

Two different tests

Authorship conventions vary by field and often include the group head, the person who ran the samples, and everyone who contributed to the manuscript.

Inventorship asks one question: who devised the subject matter as claimed? Someone who executed an experiment designed by another person may not be an inventor. Someone who suggested the key step in a corridor conversation may be.

Getting it wrong creates a defect that can be raised later, and in university settings it produces disputes between individuals and institutions that outlast the patent.

The part that gets missed

Inventorship follows the claims, and claims change during prosecution. If an examination report narrows the claims to the subject matter contributed by one person, the others may no longer be inventors of what is actually claimed.

Very few groups revisit inventorship after an FER response. They should. It takes ten minutes and prevents a category of dispute that is otherwise almost impossible to unwind.

What to actually do

• Determine inventorship from who devised the claimed subject matter.
• Do not use inventorship to recognise effort or seniority.
• Revisit it after every claim amendment.
• Keep a contemporaneous record with names and dates.