Support and Resources
Visiting (Corporate) Scientist Agreements
Investigators at the University of Chicago occasionally wish to permit visiting corporate scientists to directly participate in campus-based research programs. The visitor may represent a company that is funding or is considering funding research at the University. Typically these are brief visits to learn or observe techniques or practices where the University researchers have expertise or may be conducting studies with materials or devices of special interest to the company. Generally there is no direct funding provided to the investigator or University to cover the research costs of the visit.
However, visits from corporate or private sector scientific personnel raise some serious issues. If left undefined or not mutually understood between the parties before the visit, these issues may lead to problems afterwards. Access to University intellectual property and confidential information, such as processes, materials and data that may be openly available to all researchers in the laboratory, access to desktop computing with databases and programs that would not otherwise be available to the company, participation in information sharing of preliminary data and research design methodologies and strategies, and similar concerns remind us that such visitors should have some formal University-approved status. Special training and oversight requirements may be required if research using animals is involved.
Questions of liability in the event of injury or accident also pose certain concerns.
URA and the legal office have prepared a Visitor Agreement that covers the basic understandings that should be in place before a corporate scientist visits any University laboratory or research program. Faculty should contact URA for assistance when laboratory visits from corporate scientists are being planned. Review and signature by URA is required if work under the Agreement is carried out in conjunction with a sponsored project.
Academic Visitors:
There is a long standing tradition of having academic colleagues and researchers visit and work in laboratories. These arrangements generally proceed with the support of the department and division because some formal recognition of visitor status is requested through University channels -- often through approval for a visiting title. Faculty and investigators wishing to host academic colleagues or visitors should discuss the appropriate procedures and arrangements with department chair/dean’s offices.
June 2007
