Blanket Intellectual Property Waiver for Open Source and Public Access Requirements

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memo titled “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” on August 25, 2022. This memo provided policy guidance to US federal agencies to update their public access policies no later than December 31, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible.

As a result of this memo, Federal sponsors have begun enacting requirements to make data and software developed under sponsored awards available to the public via open access repositories or open source licenses. NIH, NASA, NOAA, and U.S. DOT are just a few of the federal sponsoring agencies that are now including such requirements in solicitations for proposals and resultant award terms and conditions. Several foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also have public access requirements.

To comply with System and Campus Intellectual Property Policies, UM College Park and UM Baltimore have approved blanket intellectual property waivers addressing the open access/open source requirements. 

Principal Investigators (PIs) may release data and software under open access and open source licensing requirements, for those sponsors that require it at the proposal submission, in accordance with the following process:

• The PI is responsible for providing a certification via Kuali Research as follows: “This proposal is being submitted to a sponsor, either directly or as a subawardee to a Prime Sponsor, that has public access or open-source requirements for data or software or specific data management/sharing requirements that would normally require a waiver of the UM IP policy. I agree to these requirements and agree to notify every person hired to work on the project, if awarded, of these requirements and to submit any necessary additional information to ORA/SPA/UM Ventures, if requested.”
• The PI is responsible for, acknowledging, and agreeing to abide by the terms and conditions of funding awards.
• The PI is responsible for educating students, post-docs, and others working under their awards or under their supervision about the IP terms of each award, including any open source requirements.
• The PI is responsible for contacting UM Ventures with questions about appropriate open source license(s) to use.
• The PI is responsible for forwarding any release or data sharing agreement that needs a UM signatory to the appropriate office.

UM Baltimore Blanket IP Waiver memo                           UM College Park Blanket IP Waiver

USM Intellectual Property Policy

List of Sponsors with Open Source/Public Access data and software policies