Glossary - P

Participant (FP7)

is a legal entity taking part in a FP7 project and having rights and obligations defined in the Grant Agreement with regard to the European Commission (on behalf of the European Union). The term participant is equivalent to the term beneficiary used in the Grant Agreement.

Participant (Horizon 2020)

means any legal entity carrying out a Horizon 2020 project or part of a project, having rights and obligations with regard to the European Union or another funding body.

Participant portal

refers to the website where the European Commission provides information on funding for research and innovation projects under Horizon 2020, the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) and Competitiveness & Innovation Programme (CIP).

Partner Organisation

in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme refers to the non-beneficiary organisations contributing to the project by providing training and hosting researchers (or staff members) during secondments. These organisations include a letter of commitment in the proposal to ensure their real and active participation in the proposed project.

Partnership agreement (FP7)

in FP7 Marie Curie actions, means an agreement signed between the beneficiary and one or more associated partners. This agreement has to be signed before the signature of the Grant Agreement.

Partnership agreement (Horizon 2020)

in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme, refers to the agreement signed between the beneficiary(ies) and the partner organization(s) with the purpose of regulating their relationship. This agreement must comply with the Grant Agreement.

Partnership Database

is one of Enterprise Europe Network's tools aimed at fostering techological and commercial partnerships between companies across Europe and beyond. It contains thousands of business, technology and research cooperation requests and offers from companies, universities and research centres from different sectors.

Patent

is granted by a government agency which, as a result, grants the recipient intellectual property rights, which confers on its owner the exclusive right to prevent third parties from commercially exploiting - making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention, which is protected by patent for a limited period of time (generally 20 years).

Patent protection is granted for inventions, which are products or processes, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and is capable of industrial application. In order to obtain patent protection, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application.

Patent Attorney

is a professional qualified in a scientific discipline and qualified to act in the obtainment of patent and design registrations.

Patent claim

defines the subject matter and technical features of the invention which are 'claimed' by the applicant/owner for exclusivity. Claims are expected to be short and supported by description section of the patent.

Patent Pool

a portfolio of patents in the same technology domain, generally owned by different parties who agreed to jointly license them.

Patentability

Patentability is the ability of an invention to satisfy the legal requirements for obtaining a patent. The invention must be novel, contain an inventive step (or be non-obvious), be capable of industrial application and not be in certain excluded fields (e.g. scientific theories and mathematical methods, these inventions cannot be patented at the EPO).

Piracy

an unauthorized copying, use, reproduction and/or distribution of materials protected by intellectual property rights for commercial purposes.

Plan for the Exploitation and Dissemination of Results (PEDR)

in Horizon 2020 is a document which summarises the beneficiaries’ strategy and concrete actions related to the protection, dissemination and exploitation of the project results. The content of the PEDR follows the evolution of the project from the proposal until the submission of the final project report.

Plan for Use and Dissemination of Foreground (PUDF)

in the context of FP7, this plan details the strategy and concrete actions for the protection, use and dissemination of the project results. It is prepared by the consortium in the early proposal stage to be presented to the Commission and becomes more detailed and completed during the project.

Plant Variety Right

is a registered intellectual property right over a new, distinct, uniform and stable botanical variety awarded to the breeder who has created it.

Pre-commercial procurement

in Horizon 2020, means the procurement of research and development services involving risk-benefit sharing under market conditions, and competitive development in phases, where there is a clear separation of the research and development services procured from the deployment of commercial volumes of end-products.

Principal Investigator (PI)

in the context of European Research Council (ERC) grant schemes, means the individual researcher that submits Starting, Consolidator and Advanced Grant proposals on behalf of the host institution and who has scientific responsibility for the project.

Prior Art

is a legal term referring to information previously disclosed to the public in any form (e.g. publications, documents, written articles, devices known, on sale, or used by the public, etc.) and any place (inside the national territory and outside) relating to the invention before its priority date.

Priority Country

is the country where the patent is first filed before being extended to other countries.

Priority Date

Priority date is the first filing date of a patent application, anywhere in the world (normally in the applicant’s domestic patent office), to protect an invention. The priority date is used to determine the novelty of the invention, which implies that it is an important concept in patent procedures.

Programme co-fund action

in Horizon 2020 means an action funded through a grant, the main purpose of which is supplementing individual calls or programmes funded by entities, other than Union funding bodies, managing research and innovation programmes. A programme co-fund action may also include complementary activities of networking and coordination between programmes in different countries.

Proprietary Software

refers to any computer software that is owned by an individual or a company and cannot be copied, used, modified or distributed by the others without having permission of its owner; its source code is almost always kept secret.

Public Body

means any legal entity established as such by national law, and international organisations.

Public Domain

is referred to when expired exclusive intellectual property right is made available for unrestricted use to the public.

Public procurement of innovative solutions

in Horizon 2020, means procurement where contracting authorities act as a launch customer for innovative goods or services which are not yet available on a large-scale commercial basis, and may include conformity testing.

Public Research Organisations

Research laboratories and agencies operated and funded entirely by government and other research organisations including universities and institutes of technology that receive a significant share of their total funding from public sources.

PUDF

see Plan for the Use and Dissemination of Foreground.