Would kids still trade baseball cards if each swap required a ten page legal agreement?

The legal requirements surrounding the exchange of research materials can feel onerous, but a newly developed template agreement should help researchers rekindle their excitement.

Today members of C4, the technology transfer consortium that links universities across Southwest Ontario, are releasing a jointly developed Material Transfer Agreement (MTA). The new MTA will be used at McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo, Western, Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier universities. Other universities are free to adopt this template agreement.

Legal contracts, MTAs cover the exchange of tangible research materials between organizations and researchers, when the receiver intends to use the material for research purposes. The MTA describes the rights of the provider and the receiver to both the original material and any derivatives. The most commonly transferred materials are biologicals, such as cell lines, but MTAs may also be required for other substances, including chemical compounds and novel materials.

The new C4 MTA has two variants, one for biological materials and one for non-biologicals. It is based on the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement, which is the de facto standard for MTAs in the United States. A C4 working group adapted this agreement to suit Canadian requirements.

“The C4 MTA keeps with emerging international expectations while meeting the needs of Canadian researchers and institutions,” says Elsie Quaite-Randall, executive director of the McMaster Industry Liaison Office. “The C4 agreements working group has produced a template that organizations across Canada can feel comfortable using.”

The new MTA realizes C4's joint goals of sharing best practices between institutions and reducing the barriers for others who work with C4 members. It also eases the flow of materials between C4 institutions. Previously, each university technology transfer office had a different MTA and institutions that wanted to collaborate with multiple C4 institutions would be faced with reviewing several MTAs. Now a business that has collaborated with, for example, the University of Guelph will already be familiar with McMaster University's MTA.

The C4 is now working on a common Inter-Institutional Agreement for C4 universities. It hopes to release that agreement this winter.

About C4

C4 fosters innovation in Southwest Ontario by promoting technology transfer and commercialization. Comprised of ten universities and research institutions, C4 members coordinate their resources, cooperate with governmental and industrial bodies, collaborate in multi-disciplinary research to solve real world problems, and commercialize the results of their research.

C4's members are McMaster, Guelph, Waterloo, Western, Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier universities, and Robarts Research Institute, the Lawson Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences, and St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton. This diverse group of universities and research institutions generates hundreds of new discoveries each year. It is C4's mission to help its members transfer these discoveries to society.