1.1 How the Guidelines are published and kept up to date

These Guidelines are updated every year in April to take account of developments in European patent law and practice. Usually, updates involve amendments to specific sentences or passages on individual pages to bring the text into line with patent law and EPO practice as these continue to evolve. It follows that no update can ever claim to be complete. In general, each edition is updated to reflect the situation as at 1 December of the previous year.

The binding version of the Guidelines for Examination in the European Patent Office is published by the EPO in searchable HTML format and as a PDF file on the EPO website (epo.org).

Both the HTML and PDF versions of the Guidelines contain:

(a) a non-exhaustive alphabetical keyword index

(b) an index of computer-implemented inventions (CII), with a collection of direct hyperlinks to the relevant chapters in the Guidelines

(c) a full list of the sections that have been amended, together with the corresponding hyperlinks.

In the HTML publication, modifications can be viewed by selecting the Show modifications box in the upper right corner, which displays inserted text with a green background and deleted text in red strikethrough font. For sections in which no changes have been made, the selection box is greyed out.