Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) was established by the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 and provides for day-for-day adjustment of patent term (i.e., the period of time a patent is in force) for certain USPTO administrative delays (“the 14-4-4-4-36 timeframes”) for certain patent applications.  The specified timeframes are to:  issue an Office Action within 14 months after application filing, respond to a reply or appeal within four months, act on the application within four months after a decision from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) or from a Federal court, and issue the patent within four months after payment of the issue fee. Additionally, a 36-month timeframe applies if the USPTO does not issue a patent within three years of the filing date or national stage commencement, with certain exceptions.  Further, time consumed by interference or derivation proceedings, delays caused by placing the application under a secrecy order under 35 U.S.C. 181, or time consumed by a successful appellate review may result in positive patent term adjustment (PTA). Any positive PTA is offset by any period that an applicant failed to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution. This measure reports the PTA for all mailed actions.

This indicator reflects the value, relevance, and usefulness of NIST research facilities to industry users. NIST research facilities are unique capabilities that can be leveraged through partnerships with businesses, especially manufacturers, to accelerate discovery and commercialization of innovative products. This indicator counts the number of Cooperative Research and Development Agreements between industry and NIST laboratories, as well as the number of industrial institutions that use the NIST user facilities (NIST Center for Neutron Research and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology).

This indicator demonstrates that NIST consistently produces useful and relevant scientific and technical publications and is outcome-oriented. The "relative citation impact" indicator is the ratio of the average number of citations per publication (citation rata) for all NIST publications in a year to the average expected citation rate for similar publications in a large group of peer institutions in the world. Publications typically lag by a minimum of two years due to the time needed for research, writing, journal peer review, and publication processes. The average for U.S. institutions is about 1.3.

Due to the cyclical nature of these programs, it is important to track annual key activities that support the programs. The internal activities that are tracked are those considered to be the most important in meeting the long-term goals of the cyclical census programs.

This indicator illustrates ITA’s reach into the U.S. business community. Historical data indicates that over 75 percent of companies assisted are small and medium–sized enterprises. This measure illustrates Global Markets’ annual effectiveness in providing export counseling and assistance to additional
U.S. companies.

The Frames Program will enhance and link the Census Bureau's four primary frames (Business Frame, Demographic Frame, Geospatial Frame, and Job Frame) to facilitate more efficient and effective exchange and use of data throughout the enterprise. The enterprise-wide linked frames will be agile in structure, accessible for production or research on a need-to-know basis, and that adhere to best practices in terms of technology usage, data management, and methodology.

The Census Bureau has initiated two enterprise programs focused on establishing shared services, minimizing redundancy, lowering complexity, and identifying cost savings for data collection, processing, and dissemination.

An Economic Benefit is a dollar value of all financial/contractual transactions, capacity investments and increases in sales to MBEs via the asisstance of MBDA programs, services and resources.