Mystery writer asks:
|        2. What rights do investigators have?  Do they maintain any property
| rights over the intellectual property of the grant proposal they originally
| conceived, wrote, and got funded?  Especially, if the proposal was conceived
and
| executed without any help of the actual institute, except for page numbering
and
| assembling the final package!? eg., the investigators, in this case, were
not
| currently affiliated with the institution prior to bringing the project to
them...

There aren't a lot of details here, but it is also worth mentioning that the
concepts of ethics and intellectual property would include acknowledging the
originators of the concept, and sharing of data developed to date among folks
who contributed to the project to date.  The matter of why an institution
would house a project when all investigators are "outsiders," or why
investigators would elect this route (instead of an SBIR, for example) could
be a topic of debate in itself, but seems less material to the issue of
intellectual property after the fact.

Could we spring to the broader question of:  who owns the intellectual
property (data, biological materials, etc.) generated by a project?  With
NIH-funded projects it is very clear that the grantee (the institution) owns
the data, but what about non-NIH-funded projects?  How many institutions have
a policy already in place regarding this matter?  Would you be willing to post
the policy or a synopsis?

The NCURA Workshop on Conflict of Interest and Misconduct in Science that just
concluded correctly advised institutions to have already in place (that is,
pre-crisis), policies covering this matter.  In the past, our institution has
relied on an "understanding" that the institution owns the data, the
institution delegates custodianship to the department and college, and the
institution enables access to those data to the project staff (thank you Dr.
Ann Stevens, Emory University).  This, in the absence of more specific or
contrary delineation, such as PHS-policy.   However, there is no campus policy
formalizing the understanding.  I would be interested reading posts from other
schools:
-- do you have a formal policy?
-- if no formal policy, what do you rely on?
-- what does it stipulate?
-- do you know how "durable" that has been upon challenge?
-- how do you publicize/promulgate the matter to faculty?
-- what would you change? what problems have you encountered?

Celia Walker
Regulatory Compliance
Colorado State University
xxxxxx@vines.colostate.edu   970/491-1563