For inventors and researchers
Date your work before any public disclosure
Publishing in order to timestamp is still publishing. Incipite anchors your file’s fingerprint on the Bitcoin blockchain and issues a dated certificate — solid prior art evidence, obtained without making anything public, and without the file leaving your computer. It is not a patent filing: it is what buys you the time to decide on one.
The moments when the date actually matters
- Just before a preprint, a conference or a seminar. If the work is patentable, that disclosure is the point of no return — and on bioRxiv and medRxiv a preprint cannot be removed.
- Before showing anything to a third party without an NDA. An industrial partner, a consortium, a panel: you want a record of what you held, on that date, without publishing any of it.
- A funding proposal. It contains the idea, it is read by peers who are also competitors, and it is never published. No preprint covers that case.
- Data or code you cannot release. An industrial embargo, health data, a licence still being negotiated: an open repository is out of the question, the date is still needed.
Scenario
A team finalises a process and is about to post the manuscript, as it always does — free, dated, indexed. Nobody asked whether the process was patentable. Once the preprint is online the question no longer arises: in Europe the answer is no, and it is final.
What exists, and what it actually covers
Most of these are excellent and free. This table is not here to diminish them, but to show that none of them gives you a date WITHOUT publishing — except the last one, and a patent filing.
| Option | Cost | What it gives | The limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preprint (arXiv, bioRxiv, HAL) | Free | Date, DOI, citability | Excellent, and the right choice if your work is publishable. But publication is public and irreversible: bioRxiv and medRxiv do not remove preprints. If it was patentable, it no longer is. |
| OSF registration under embargo | Free | Frozen date, content private up to 4 years | The closest thing to what you are looking for, and free. Built for study pre-registration: less suited to a process, a drawing, raw data or code. |
| Bound laboratory notebook | A few pounds | Countersigned traceability | A discipline tool and a bundle of clues. Since the move to first-inventor-to-file it can no longer defeat a competing application; it remains useful on inventorship and trade secrets. |
| Electronic lab notebook with RFC 3161 timestamps | Subscription | Timestamp by a trusted authority | Legally STRONGER than us where the timestamp is qualified under eIDAS: it then carries a presumption of accuracy that a blockchain anchor does not. |
| Patent application | High | A priority date, and a right | The only route that creates a right and a priority date. Nothing replaces it. If your work has commercial value, that is where to start. |
| Incipite | A couple of pounds | An enforceable date, publishing nothing | A fingerprint anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain, with no expiry, verifiable by a third party without going through us. No disclosure: the file never leaves your computer. |
The point many people discover too late
In Europe novelty is absolute: Article 54 of the European Patent Convention makes everything made available to the public before filing part of the state of the art — including what you published yourself. Article 55 allows only two exceptions, within six months: evident abuse, and official international exhibitions. Deliberately posting a preprint falls under neither. In the United States a twelve-month grace period exists, but it does not shield you from an independent disclosure made in the meantime.
How it works, in three steps
- 1Gather what you are not ready to show. A manuscript, a drawing, a dataset, a code snapshot, a process note. A ZIP archive goes through as one deposit, each file keeping its own fingerprint.
- 2Deposit it on Incipite. The SHA-256 fingerprint is computed inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is published, nothing is indexed: sixty-four hexadecimal characters are all we receive.
- 3Keep the certificate, then talk to your tech transfer office. The date is secured. It gives you time to work through the patent question without the clock running against you.
If it has commercial value, start there
Talk to your technology transfer office or a patent attorney — including before using us. A patent application is the only route that creates a right; we do not replace that step, we give you the time to take it.
What Incipite does not do — please read this
- It does not give you a priority date. Priority arises from a filing at a patent office, not from a timestamp. Europe is first-to-file: if a third party files tomorrow, our certificate will not hand you the patent instead.
- Our timestamp is not a qualified eIDAS timestamp. It therefore carries no presumption of accuracy under Article 41(2). It is an item of evidence, assessed on its merits — exactly like the timestamp of arXiv or HAL, incidentally.
- It does not prove you are the author or the inventor. The depositor’s identity is self-declared: we verify no identity document, and the certificate says so. What is proven is that one exact file existed at one exact date and that you had it in hand.
- It does not replace arXiv, bioRxiv or Zenodo. If your work is publishable and no patent is in play, post a preprint: it is free, indexed, citable, and seventeen journals attach a four-month scooping protection to it. We serve the opposite case.
Where the law stands
Article 41(1) of the EU eIDAS Regulation forbids dismissing an electronic time stamp on the sole ground that it is not qualified: it must be assessed on its merits. And several European systems recognise a prior personal possession right for whoever held the invention in good faith before a third party filed — an enforceable date serves that directly. The case law in detail →
Frequently asked
+Why not simply post a preprint?
Do, if your work is publishable and no patent is in play — it is free and it beats us on that ground. Incipite serves the case where you CANNOT publish: because it is confidential, because it is patentable, or because it is data you will not release.
+Does it give me anteriority against a competing patent?
Not in patent law terms. It can however support a prior personal possession right, a question of inventorship, or the fact that you held a trade secret at a given date. Those are real uses, but different ones.
+Can a reviewer really scoop me?
It is documented, though rare. An exploratory survey published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics, covering 220 authors, reported that 5% believed a reviewer had used their ideas, data or methods without permission. The least covered case remains the funding proposal, read by peers and never published.
+Do you see my work?
Never. The SHA-256 fingerprint is computed inside your browser; sixty-four hexadecimal characters are all that reaches us. That is also what guarantees no disclosure takes place: there is nothing on our side to disclose.
+What about a lab notebook?
It keeps all its value for traceability and discipline. But since the move to first-inventor-to-file it can no longer defeat a competing application. An electronic notebook timestamped in RFC 3161 by a trusted authority is, for its part, legally stronger than our anchor.
+What if Incipite disappears?
Your proof survives. It rests on OpenTimestamps, an open protocol in use since 2016. The .ots receipt you download verifies with the official client, without us.
3 free certifications for life · No credit card · Nothing is published
Date my work →Solid prior art evidence — replaces neither a patent filing, nor a preprint, nor your tech transfer office’s advice.
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