Introduction and background

This website provides a toolkit for universities and companies that wish to undertake collaborative research projects with each other. The toolkit consists of a set of five Model Research Collaboration (one to one) Agreements and four Consortium (multi-party) Agreements and documents that should help you to use and understand those agreements. The toolkit was prepared by the Lambert Working Group on Intellectual Property.

The objectives of the toolkit are to:

• facilitate negotiations between potential collaborators;
• reduce the time and effort required to secure agreement; and
• provide examples of best practice.

The toolkit identifies the key elements of a Research Collaboration Agreement or a Consortium Agreement and how they might vary in a number of different circumstances. You can customise the wording of each model agreement to reflect the actual deal you have negotiated. For this reason, the model agreements are provided in a form that allows modification and are not fixed templates.

Decision guide

A Decision Guide is provided to help you identify the most appropriate of the five Model Research Collaboration Agreements to use as a starting point. The Guide helps identify some of the key factors that you might take into account when deciding which of those model agreements most closely meets your needs. It is not exhaustive, and there may be other factors that influence your decision.

Further explanation of the Decision guide

The decision guide is for use with the bilateral Research Collaboration Agreements only. There is no Decision Guide for the four Consortium Agreements because there are too many possible permutations for multi-party research.

Guidance notes

The guidance notes provide a commentary and explanation of the terms of the model agreements and some of the legal issues.

Outlines

The Collaboration Outline and Consortium Outline provide a summary of the issues that should be taken into account when negotiating, respectively, a Research Collaboration Agreement or a Consortium Agreement.