Material Transfer Agreements

= The Materials Transfer Project arose from the recommendations of a conference of research funders, university technology transfer officers, and legal experts organized by Science Commons to explore ways to remove transactional barriers to research.

Description

Thinh Nguyen:

"Material Transfer Agreements (“MTAs”) are contracts that govern the transfer of tangible research materials from one research institution (the provider) to another (the recipient). They are most commonly employed in the transfer of “unique research resources” such as “cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, growth factors, combinatorial chemistry and DNA libraries, clones and cloning tools (such as PCR), methods, laboratory equipment and machines.”2 Non-biological and synthetic materials, such as certain nano-materials, chemical reagents, and chemical substrates may be shared under MTAs as well.

Science Commons proposes to reduce unnecessary transaction costs for sharing research materials by a creating voluntary and scalable infrastructure for rights representation and contracting represented by use standard agreements, Webbased metadata, and “human-readable deeds.” These elements arise from design principles introduced by Creative Commons in creating the Creative Commons (CC) licenses for copyrighted works, which have created a large and scalable infrastructure for authors, scientists, artists, and educators to license their works in standard but flexible ways. This has created a large and thriving community of users and a commons of copyrighted materials available under CC licenses." (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.137)