C&RL News March 2022 137

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail:  
pattillo@email.unc.edu

Patents
The top five patent assignees in 2021 were International Business Machines 
Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Canon Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor 
Manufacturing Co. TSMC Ltd., and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. IBM 
was granted 8,682 patents. Huawei was granted 2,770 patents.
IFI Claims Patent Services, “2021 Top 50 US Patent Assignees,” January 5, 2022, https://www.
ificlaims.com/rankings-top-50-2021.htm (retrieved February 4, 2022).

ArXiv.org
ArXiv.org, the preprint “hub for physicists, astronomers, computer scientists, mathema-
ticians, and other researchers,” surpassed the 2 million papers milestone on January 3, 
2022. “In 2008, 17 years after it went online, arXiv hit 500,000 papers. By late 2014 that 
total had doubled to one million. Seven years later, arXiv has doubled its library again.”
Daniel Garisto, “ArXiv.Org Reaches a Milestone and a Reckoning,” Scientific American, January 10, 2022, https://
www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches-a-milestone-and-a-reckoning (retrieved February 4, 2022).

Image provenance: Identifying deep fakes
“The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) addresses 
the prevalence of misleading information online through the development 
of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) 
of media content. C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project, formed 
through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic.” 
Version 1.0 of their standard for digital content provenance is now available.
Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, “C2PA Specifications,” 2022, https://
c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.0/index.html (retrieved February 4, 2022).

Open index of scholarly papers
“An ambitious free index of more than 200 million scientific documents that 
catalogues publication sources, author information, and research topics, has been 
launched. The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria in 
Egypt, also aims to chart connections between these data points to create a com-
prehensive, interlinked database of the global research system. …” “Together, these 
make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph of hundreds 
of millions of entities and over a billion connections between them all.”
Dalmeet Singh Chawla, “Massive Open Index of Scholarly Papers Launches,” Nature, January 24, 2022, 
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y (retrieved February 7, 2022) and “OpenAlex Documen-
tation,” https://docs.openalex.org (retrieved February 7, 2022).

mailto:pattillo%40email.unc.edu?subject=
https://www.ificlaims.com/rankings-top-50-2021.htm
https://www.ificlaims.com/rankings-top-50-2021.htm
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches-a-milestone-and-a-reckoning
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches-a-milestone-and-a-reckoning
https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.0/index.html
https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.0/index.html
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00138-y