The intellectual property community benefits each time another Office joins the Digital Access Service (DAS).
The good news is that on November 1, 2017, the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) will join DAS.
EAPO will participate with DAS in both directions:
- as a depositing Office, and
- as an accessing Office.
The participation will include color documents as well as gray scale and black and white documents.
This is very good news.
Perhaps the biggest patent office (in terms of volume of patent filings) that has not yet joined DAS is the European Patent Office. Here is a set of slides which EPO presented in May of 2015. At slide 8, the EPO said:
It will surely be a welcome development when EPO joins DAS.
Another welcome development will be when EUIPO joins DAS, which will facilitate exchange of priority documents for the purpose of industrial design applications.
(See followup article on EPO’s plans to join DAS.)
It will be recalled that on September 1, 2017 the search fee paid by US filers of PCT applications for the EPO searching authority increased from $1992 to $2099. Now it has been announced that on December 1, 2017 this fee will increase again, this time to $2238. 
It will be recalled that recently the USPTO announced that it will change the way that electronic certified copies of priority documents are transmitted between the USPTO and the Japanese Patent Office. The change takes effect today. Among other things, this will affect how you complete your Application Data Sheet to present a priority claim to a Japanese patent application.