OIP - Glossary
All faculty and academic staff are required by state and federal law to file an annual report of outside activities and financial interests. The Conflict of Interest Committee reviews any disclosures and provides guidance for managing or eliminating actual or perceived conflicts of interest.
Copyrights
A copyright gives the creator of an original work the exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. It is a type of intellectual property (like patents, trademarks and trade secrets) applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete.
Cost sharing occurs when the University redirects resources to support a specific sponsored project beyond the funding level provided by the sponsor, and it is greatly discouraged. Cost share commitments must be approved by the Chair and Dean of the investigator's school.
Effort certification is required by federal sponsors and has two purposes: (1) to assure the sponsor that the salaries charged to the project are not in excess of the time spent on the project, and (2) to ensure that the amount of time spent on the project is consistent with what was proposed. All personnel who are paid on grant funds, regardless of funding source (industrial, non-profit, associations, etc.), must certify their effort.
Facilities and Administrative (F&A) Costs
F&A (or indirect) costs are real costs that provide reimbursement to the UW for actual institutional expenses that support extramural activities but that cannot be directly charged to a grant or contract, and are negotiated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our negotiated agreement with DHHS includes the provision that for-profit entities must include F&A costs at the agreed federal rate.
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)
UW-Madison takes seriously the health, well-being and care involved in research with live vertebrates. Any research done using animals requires that the research design be approved by the IACUC. This approval must be in place before an award can be finalized and an account number assigned to the project.
Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Human Subjects
The careful consideration of any research that involves human participants is mandatory before a project may begin. The IRB reviews the research design and the proposed consent information. Once approved, the protocol must be re-reviewed annually.
IP includes trademarks, copyrights, and patents. The University does not claim ownership rights in the intellectual property of its faculty, staff and students produced during research, except as required by funding agreements or other University policies, including the right of the University to use such property for its educational and research purposes.
Invention Disclosure/Equity Review
Research funding that results in an invention of any type, regardless of the source of the funding, must be disclosed in order to comply with federal statues and University policy. Investigators must fill out an Invention Disclosure Report (IDR) form when making a submission of any kind (patentable invention, copyrightable software, biological material, etc.) to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) . The form can be found here. Once WARF processes the disclosure, the Graduate School conducts an equity review to ascertain what funding was used, and thus who owns the rights to the invention.
A license is the legal permission from a patent owner (WARF, usually, in the case of UW-Madison) to practice an invention.
Material Transfer Agreement (MTA)
MTAs are used for incoming and outgoing research materials at the University. They describe the terms under which University investigators and outside researchers can share these materials, typically for research and evaluation purposes. MTAs protect the intellectual property of both the investigator and the sponsor.
A patent is the grant of a property right to inventor(s), issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). A patent right is "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. The UW System provides information on UW System patent policy.
Principal Investigator (PI)
The University individual who has the primary responsibility for the scientific, administrative, and fiscal conduct of the project is most often referred to simply as the PI. This can be confusing to those not familiar with the lingo.
Tangible Research Property (TRP)
TRP includes items that are produced in the course of conducting research projects at the UW. Such materials can include biological materials, chemical compounds, physical samples, integrated circuit chips, prototype devices, and equipment. It does not include intangible (or intellectual) property such as patentable inventions and original works protected by copyright or trademark.
Technology Transfer
This is a formal transfer of rights to use and commercialize new discoveries and innovations resulting from scientific research to another party. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is the tech transfer organization for UW-Madison investigators.
Logos and brand names are examples of trademarks. It is a name, word, symbol or device that allows the trademark owner to dictate its use in identifying a place (UW) or product.
Office of Industrial Partnerships
202 Bascom Hall
500 Lincoln Drive
Madison, WI 53706
oip@grad.wisc.edu