Distributing Works to Academics

Academic Licenses
Many UW software tools, content, and digital media are available under an academic license to qualified licensees. UW TechTransfer’s Digital Ventures unit partners with faculty to identify research goals and draft academic licenses to enable the sharing of works with appropriate academic and research communities.

Permission Agreements
It is useful to illustrate the demand for digital materials you have created by tracking "permission agreements" given by UW to allow others to use your project’s materials in scholarly articles, non-commercial presentations and demonstrations, and in courses. Digital Ventures has innovative ways, such as click-thru licensing, to provide permission for others to use UW digital materials and track the demand. Tracking permission agreements can be an effective way to communicate to your funding sources that UW research is being actively disseminated and used.

Research Commons
As investigators and scholars tackle increasingly complex problems, their research has increasingly involved collaborative efforts of many individuals at multiple institutions and is often multi-disciplinary as well. We can help construct these relationships and a research commons to enable multi-institution collaboration and manage the resulting intellectual property issues. For example, we helped set up the Rosetta Commons for the ongoing development of the Rosetta protein structure software, and currently manage Rosetta software licensing and revenue distribution for multiple research institutions.

Express Licenses
Some of the software and tools created at the University of Washington are available through express licenses. These licenses have standard terms and conditions that allow for rapid licensing. The conditions and financial terms of express licenses apply only to those who sign and return them "as is."

Express licenses are useful in establishing a domain/industry standard by developing UW's attribution as the source for expertise and innovation. We typically test a license format with several licensees before locking down the terms to scale the licensing activity toward a "standards" strategy.

Open Source Distribution
UW OpenDOOR is a portal to the source code, freeware, web tools and data sets offered for public use by the University of Washington scholarly community. Managed by UW TechTransfer’s Digital Ventures unit, OpenDOOR makes it easy for visitors to see and explore all the open innovations developed at the UW. Some innovations may have conditions attached by the developers to their availability, and those conditions, as we've been able to discern, are noted on each innovation's entry.

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