The Open Science Agreements Toolkit

The success of open science depends on more than just changing how scientists do research.

The work of researchers is embedded in a network of relationships with institutions, industry, funders, patients, patient groups, research participants, and more.

Many of these relationships rely on formal legal agreements. Whether researchers are sending materials and data to one another (material and data transfer agreements), funders are providing the funds needed to conduct research (funding agreements), groups are collaborating on a single project (project collaboration agreements), groups are conducting an ongoing research effort (partnership and collaboration agreements), or research participants are giving their consent to have their materials and data released (informed consent forms), they all rely on legally binding agreements.

The Open Science Agreements Toolkit (OSAT) is a project to develop versions of agreements aimed at enabling best open science practices and providing users with an alternative to traditional, restrictive agreements.

Each document in the OSAT is built around open science pillars:

1. No Restrictive Intellectual Property;
2. Open sharing of all research resources; and
3. Sharing credit through attribution and persistent digital indentifiers;

Contents of the OSAT

The current release of the OSAT contains initial versions of:

1. The Open Science Material and Data Transfer Agreement (OSMDTA)
2. The Open Science Funding Agreement (OSFA)
3. The Open Science Project Agreement (OSPA)
4. The Open Science Collaboration Agreement (OSFA)
5. Human Readable Summaries for Each Document

All of these documents are made available in .doc format so you can easily modify them.

Keep in mind these are Beta release versions to enable community engagement and distributed development. They will take more work to hone them and adapt them to to different contexts.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Healthy Brains Healthy Lives for funding the work that went into creating these initial OSAT documents as a Knowledge Mobilization Grant under the title "Open Science Policy Mobilization".

Prof. Richard Gold was the lead principle investigator with Prof. Bartha Knoppers, Prof. Yann Joly, and Dr. Jason Karamchandani as co-investigators.

We would further like to thank Mr. Max Morgan and the Structural Genomics Consortium for providing copies of their agreements as starting material as well as for advice throughout the project. Similarly, we would like to thank Dr. Jason Karamchandani for providing documents developed for use by the CBIG Repository at The Neuro.

**Disclaimer: These agreements are templates and still in development. They are provided for discussion and shared development but nothing contained in the OSAT should be construed as legal advice or forming a lawyer client relationship. Furthermore, we cannot guarantee that any document herein is appropriate for your use. They are provided for your information and modification but no party involved with the creation of the OSAT is to be held liable for any claim or dispute arising from their use or distribution.**