Last year, we took up the issue of research contracts in our report for HEFCE on “Effective Practice in Knowledge Sharing,” which helped inform the McMillan report on technology transfer. This showed that a number of courses, templates, tools and other reference materials are available to help institutions manage their contracts, in particular ARMA and PraxisUnico. The publication in 2016 of an updated Lambert toolbox and revised agreements with Brunswick (for institutional cooperation) has further improved matters. The series of model agreements is supported by guidelines defining the objectives and detailing how the agreement should be used in the development of clinical research contracts that should be sponsored by pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical or medical companies. Time to Market is important, so why spend time and money negotiating confidentiality, material transfer, or collaborative research agreements when the work has been done for you? Nationally approved model agreements help speed up the contractual process of industry-sponsored studies in the NHS by creating the need for site checks and local legal agreements. This enables an earlier start-up, improves the speed of industry-sponsored clinical trials and allows NHS patients to access innovative treatments faster. In order to simplify the process of cooperation with a research partner, the Scottish University partners concluded a set of downloadable and standardised legal agreements that were agreed by both parties before the start of the project. The Brunswick arma.ac.uk/updated-brunswick-agreements/ available to all UK universities are based on the series of agreements established and agreed for use by all Scottish universities, which have been consulted with both russell Group universities and the Brunswick Group. In addition, we are working with our partner Mark Hochman in Australia to extend the practice to Australian, New Zealand and Singaporean universities, as the legal environment and industry structure between these countries and the UK are similar. The Lambert Working Group on Intellectual Property (IP) created the toolkit. The objectives of the toolkit are: (iii) cooperating institutions are listed in the application as companies of a specific and significant part of the project; and the project is available to all universities and other public sector research organizations, not just those of the Brunswick Group. The institutions that have registered for its use are as follows: we believe it is reasonable to expect universities to be willing to sign identical terms for incoming and outgoing transfers for routine material transfers.
Although this agreement can be used unilaterally, we believe that it will be more effective as the basis for an agreement between two institutions for all routine transfers between them in both directions. Before this closure, we believe it is ripe to re-examine the issue of research contracts and to carry out a new benchmarking in early 2018. . .
