MILO helps researchers market their discoveries
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Martin_Ginis.jpg” caption=”Kathleen Martin Ginis, professor in the Department of Kinesiology. File photo.”]From metres to pascals, from the Beaufort scale to Rockwell hardness, science relies on standard measurements, but when two McMaster kinesiologists invented a new measurement, they found promoting the adoption of their new standard required a strategy of its own.
The McMaster kinesiologists wanted to study physical activity in people with spinal cord injuries, but they had a fundamental problem: there was no standard to measure the level of physical activity in this group, so they set out to establish a measure.
After two years of designing, testing and validating the Physical Activity Recall Assessment for People with Spinal Cord Injury (PARA-SCI) protocol, professor Kathleen Martin Ginis and doctoral student Amy Latimer (now an assistant professor at Queen's University), had a reliable and quantitative method of measuring physical activity among people with spinal cord injuries.
Now, this measurement tool is being used globally and quickly becoming the standard measure in the field, and with the help of the McMaster Industry Liaison Office, their protocol is now available online in a way that is easy to access while protecting its research integrity.
Shortly after publishing the research validating PARA-SCI, Martin Ginis and Latimer started receiving requests from around the world to use the assessment tool. Researchers in places like South Africa, China and the Netherlands wanted to access PARA-SCI. This represented a great opportunity — PARA-SCI could become the standard for the field — but posed a problem: how to efficiently respond to requests.
“I'm very proud of this instrument, so I wanted the distribution of it to be as professional as possible,” says Martin Ginis. She also wanted the tool to be used in a consistent way, so that, for example, a study in China can be compared to one from Europe.
Martin Ginis' solution was to turn to the McMaster Industry Liaison Office (MILO). The office has years of experience in distributing and marketing assessment tools such as the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire.
Copyright officer Chabriol Colebatch worked with Martin Ginis to develop an efficient distribution method that would accomplish Martin Ginis' goal of establishing PARA-SCI as the default measurement tool in the field.
“People associate copyright with music labels and movie studios trying to make money, but we can use the tools of copyright to accomplish academic goals,” says Colebatch.
In this case, Colebatch worked with the authors to ensure ownership was clear and then drafted a license that users would need to agree to. She then arranged for PARA-SCI to be posted on Flintbox, a pan-Canadian website where universities market discoveries and tools.
By requiring users to enter a license agreement, Martin Ginis and McMaster can put conditions on the tool's use, preventing users from unilaterally “altering” the tool in ways that would diminish its value. It also ensures that users don't co-opt Martin Ginis and Latimer's work or hijack it for commercial purposes.
“Over the past few years, MILO has expanded the services it offers to fit the needs of the social sciences and humanities. We can magnify the tangible impact on society of research results by using the intellectual property and marketing tools that historically have been applied to engineering and science,” notes Elsie Quaite-Randall, executive director of MILO.
