Michelle K. Lee, under secretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), recently announced new open data initiatives that will make access to tons of patent data much easier, during her visit to MIT. Lee said that patent data has always been open to the public, but not always easily accessible. The goal of the new open data initiatives is to change that. The USPTO has launched an Open Data Portal (still in beta version), which is the USPTO’s first-ever release of application program interfaces (APIs). This allows developers to build data visualization and data mining software applications, and find innovative uses of patent data. As one example, patent data has been used to forecast technological change. For more details, please visit http://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/open-data-and-mobility.