By Shoaib Sufi, Community Leader.

Issues around IP are the cause of some of the most contentious and persistent problems that affect researchers. Who owns IP? How do you license it? Can you share information with collaborators? Who can help you understand IP issues at your university? The Institute’s Intellectual Property (IP), copyright, licensing and commercialisation workshop (IPCLC) will be held on 11 December 2014 in Oxford at the Oxford e-Research Centre from 10.00 to 17.00. It’s free to attend.

A good understanding of IP, Copyright, Licensing and Commercialisation is an invaluable tool for anyone embarking on a research career. It can help you prepare your work so that the majority of IP-related problems are solved before they arise, and if you do run into problems, a grounding in IP can help you resolve problems before they become serious.

As you progress through your research career, new problems are likely to appear: writing collaboration agreements, understanding if a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is necessary, or simply understanding how you can exploit your IP. Resolving these more complex problems will require negotiations with IP departments at your own institution and possibly with others too. Picking your way through these negotiations is much easier if you understand the terminology, the issues at hand, and have a good idea of where to get help.

Research is becoming ever more reliant on software and generates ever more data. Who owns the software that you produce? Can/should you open source it? How should you license your code? Can you commercialise it?

All of these problems and more will be discussed at the IPCLC workshop, organised by the Software Sustainability Institute. The workshop brings researchers and IP professionals together to discuss problems and work on answers. It’s an open workshop where you will have time to raise the issues that have affected your work.

In addition to experts from university IP departments, we are grateful to have support from qLegal (Queen Mary University of London), Oxford Research Services and the Oxford Incubator. Experts from these three groups will discuss how researchers can realise their ideas in a business scenario, the agreements that are needed to be allowed to work with industry, and the theory and practice of taking software-driven research to market. All of our experts will take part in a Q&A session so that you can benefit from their expertise and experience.

With the help from our experts, we will write a report about the main issues that were raised and their solutions. This will be made freely available after the workshop, which will allow more researchers to benefit from the discussions that take place and, we hope, help fill some of the gaps in the advice that is currently available for academics.

If you want to improve your understanding of IP and how it affects your work, or you have a problem that you want to solve, then please register for this important event. See you in Oxford!