Collaboration agreement template
A collaboration agreement is the contract between a university or research institution and a company working together on a project, setting out who contributes what, who owns the results, and how findings may be published. This version is the Lambert collaboration agreement published by the Intellectual Property Office, with the financial contribution, intellectual property, publication, confidentiality, liability and data protection terms, plus schedules for the project, funding and data. It is completed for each collaboration, with the partners, the project and the money changing each time.
Adapted from Intellectual Property Office (22 May 2018). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What changes each time
11 values. Everything else is your wording, kept exactly.
The partners
- Institution
- Company
- Lead Academic
- Company's Supervisor
The project
- Commencement date
- Grant Offer Letter date
- Progress report frequency
Money and risk
- Payment period
- Invoice frequency
- Aggregate liability cap
- Confidentiality after the project
The rules it usually needs
Written in plain English when the template is set up.
- One of several wordings
“Limitation of liability: either a warranty is given or no warranty is given.”
The email said the Institution gives no warranty on the results, so the no-warranty wording was used.
- The AI decides from the paperwork
“Include the export control clause where UK or US export control law applies to either party.”
Left to the AI, which left it out for a person to decide.
One worked example, start to finish
The collaboration agreement in DocuWeave, from upload to approval.
1The document uploaded
The Lambert collaboration agreement, a Word file, uploaded as it is.
- 2
The template it became
It found 79 sections and 86 values, and asked 33 questions before publishing.
3The paperwork dropped in
The heads of terms and the partner's email.
4What was found, with sources
32 of 86 values filled from the paperwork, each with the passage it came from.
5What it asked
34 things for a person: choices, figures the template says are always checked and details the paperwork did not give.
Questions people ask
What is a collaboration agreement?
It is a contract between organisations working together on a project, usually setting out each side's contribution, who owns what comes out of it, and how confidential information and publications are handled.
What is the Lambert toolkit?
It is a set of model research collaboration agreements published by the UK Government's Intellectual Property Office to speed up negotiations between universities and businesses.
Who owns the intellectual property in a research collaboration?
It depends on the agreement. A common choice is for one party to own the results with a licence to the other, or for ownership to follow who created them. The agreement should say which.
Can the university publish the results of the project?
Usually, after giving the company advance notice and a chance to ask for confidential material to be removed or a patent filed first. The notice and delay periods are set in the agreement.
Can I use my own collaboration agreement?
Yes. Upload your own Word or PDF version and DocuWeave turns it into a template in your wording, with the same kind of rules and the same filling from paperwork.
Use this template
It opens in DocuWeave as a template you can check, change and publish. Nothing is used until you do.