 So we're just about to start. Welcome, everyone, to the latest in the ANS licensing webinar series. We have with us today, as usual, our regular guest, Baden Appliart. Hello, Baden. Hello, Baden. We used to have Baden with us. How are you doing? Baden is here. That's good. We'll find up there in sunny Brisbane, Baden. It's yet another delightful day in Queensland, Adrian. It's excellent. And we'll hear a little bit more from Baden about some developments in Osgold a little bit later. We have a special guest today, Dr Kevin Cullen. Hi, Kevin. Hello. So Kevin's here because we have an interest in the broader aspects of intellectual property and how that impacts on licensing. And Kevin is from New South Innovations. That's based at the University of New South Wales. Is that correct, Kevin? That's correct, yep. And would it be correct to say that's the sort of knowledge transfer arm of the university? Yes, it is. Good. And just where we sort of see that fitting in, because you know, this is a forum where we talk about all things licensing, open access, particularly to do with data. But we, Baden and I, never limit ourselves in broad-ranging conversations that we have. However, in order to license something, you've got to know who owns it and where does it, who has the ability to license things and your licensing fits in a broader intellectual property kind of framework. And the licensing around data in particular has its own little significant qualities that make it a particular area. However, you know, it can't be seen as, you know, divorced from that larger context. So, Kevin's journey today and he hopefully will talk to us about some terrific innovative stuff that's happening at the New South Innovations. Kevin, I believe, how long have you been with the New South Innovations, Kevin? 18 months. 18 months. So, it's still new. Yeah, as the CEO, is it wrong? That's correct, yep. And I'm not from around here, you might have guessed. Yes, I was going to say previous to that, you seem to have picked up an accent from somewhere else. Yeah, I was at the University of Glasgow doing this for 11 years before I came to Sydney. Okay, and what was that in the research office world? Is that right? Yeah, I was director of research and enterprise, which was the sort of research administration and tech transfer part of the University of Glasgow. Terrific, that's good. So, I believe you have some slides in the presentation for us, is that right? We'll cross over to those in a sec. After that, we will have some time for questions and answers, a bit of discussion around the issues that Kevin raises. We'll, a little bit later, have an update from Baden as well. So, lots of interesting things for our discussion today. Just to give you an idea, today we've got around 20, 25 people participating directly in the webinar. If you're listening or watching this at a later date in the future, consider joining the webinars live. It gives you the chance to participate and ask questions and give us some ideas as well. We've got people mostly from universities around Australia, Canberra University, ANU, QUT, lots of people. I'm just skimming through our guest list here. UQ, Western Australia, so really from all around Australia. We have a couple of people from public sector organizations in different states around Australia. So, a broad range of people involved. If anyone is in the audience and wants to ask a question, there is a little chat module that you'll see on the little go-to meeting window. So, if you just type something in there, then we can, we'll get to that question when we get to the discussion part. If you have a microphone, we can always cross to you as well to get questions. Let's go into Kevin's presentation now. Just do a little technology handshake here. Looks like we're all right. Yes, we can see your screen there, Kevin. Very good. So, I now have control. Yes. Although, Baden and I will do our best to derail that. All right, so I'll just take it from here, yeah? Yes. Okay, thank you very much for inviting me. I'm, as it says on the screen, Kevin Cullen. I've been at UNSW for 18 months. I've been doing tech transfer for 18 years. One of those pesky tech transfer people who, when you go around the world, seem to get the blame for all the failings of the economy. And today, I'm going to talk about Easy Access IP, which is an initiative that we have developed to try and make the flow of knowledge more efficient and effective. I'm going to spend most time talking about the sort of philosophical underpinnings for it. And I'll set the context by saying it was developed for, you know, classical technology transfer patents and licensing and IP and all that. But I think the logic and the philosophy behind it apply in just about all areas of university activity, whether those are ideas or data or software or whatever. I'll just launch into it. And as I said, having been doing this for a long, long time, I got to the point of having to ask the very fundamental question, what is tech transfer for? It seems like a fairly naive question to have to ask yourself after doing it for 18 years. But what I discovered was, depending who you spoke to and when you spoke to them, you'd actually have different views. Some people believe that university tech transfer commercialization is about making money for the university to generate revenues to make academic rich and to reinvest in research, teaching, facilities, etc. Some people, especially academics, think that tech transfer is there to help them to achieve their research objectives. And other people, usually economic development agencies and governments and politicians and policymakers, think that tech transfer is an economic development activity that should be creating jobs and improving the economy and society around us. And as I say, depending who you were speaking to and where you were speaking to them, you'd often get one or a mixture of all three of these. And I came to the conclusion, eventually, that it's actually none of these. None of these is the reason why we do technology transfer and why we do tech transfer is actually to help the university to achieve its mission. And the university mission is, in my simplistic understanding, to create and disseminate knowledge. I've now made that statement to thousands and thousands of people and no one has actually ever disagreed. I think everyone's on mute here, so you probably don't get a chance to disagree, but you can disagree with me later on. The university exists to create and disseminate knowledge. The knowledge creation bit is relatively simple in its research. And we all understand research and we know how it's funded and how it's assessed and how it's measured and all these different things. The knowledge dissemination part of the university's mission is, in my view, sort of split across three different areas. The one that dominates at the moment probably is publication. And this is the university disseminating its knowledge through the, in the form of publications, usually to other scientists or other researchers or other people who can use the research outputs to go and do something useful with them, to build upon them. Teaching is another big one. The University takes its knowledge and puts it into the heads of students so they can take the university's knowledge and go and do something useful with it. And I argue that knowledge transfer, commercialization, tech transfer, whatever it's called this week, is simply another mechanism, another conduit through which this dissemination happens. In the same way as publication puts it into people's hands to use it and teaching puts it into people's heads to use it, tech transfer is just another mechanism by which to get the knowledge into the hands of someone, somewhere who can go and do something useful with it. In this case, it's usually business, industry, entrepreneurs, but it can also be policymakers, public servants, politicians, etc. And I'll show you my diagram. I've been using this for many years now. I drew it one afternoon in a fit of frustration at my inability to understand what the hell I was trying to do and what was going to make it work. And forgive the formatting, it's a little bit off, but hopefully you'll understand. We do research. The primary outputs of research are new knowledge and new and better researchers. We all get that. These manifest themselves in all these different things, publications, processes, IP, know-how, skills, innovation, and ways universities create these in industrial quantities. We at UNSW do $300 million worth of research per annum, and we create loads and loads and loads of this stuff, which sort of gets counted by people and heretic returns and all these different surveys. It then comes into my world, the tech transfer world, the knowledge exchange, commercialization world. And in this box, you can see all the different activities that we as universities and research organizations undertake every day of the week, be it consultancy, professional training, collaborative research, contract research, licensing, spin-outs, all of these things that we do based upon the knowledge that's created in the university. And the thing that they all have in common is that they are simply conduits, their channels through which the university's knowledge flows to these people on the other side of the box. The startups, spin-outs, small companies, big companies, society, government, policymakers, the people who make use of our knowledge to go and create these things that everyone wants to see happen, all the impacts, jobs, products, processes, investment in R&D, all the things that the policymakers and politicians desperately want to see coming out of the universities, these impacts. And as you know, we last year conducted an impact pilot in Australia that followed on from an impact pilot in the UK, which was looking at what research has done to create impacts in the world outside the academy. And we came up with all sorts of case studies and stories and examples. The thing that struck me about the exercise though was the fact that these impacts are created by the research users. It's really tricky because I don't know exactly who's on the line, but I've got myself into trouble before by saying the problem is that universities don't actually create impacts. University's key role is to help other people to create these impacts. Because what we're doing is we're trying to get the research from the left-hand end into the hands of the research users so they can create impacts. But the tech transfer function in the university isn't the place that creates these impacts. And that has some implications for what we're trying to do in the way in which we're doing it. So this model, this diagram of mine, as I say I've been using for many years, because I think it explains a number of things. It shows that tech transfer isn't a linear process. It's actually a complex chaotic system which operates over years if not decades. That research at the left-hand end does feed into impact at the right-hand end. However, the route by which it gets there is chaotic. When you do the research, you have no means at all of predicting what the impact is going to be or how it's going to be achieved. Because it has to go through all these different routes, sometimes iterating back and forth over years and decades before it will eventually end up as an impact. And that, I think, has implications for policymakers as well. Because every now and again, you have these pushes towards having more directed research, impact directed research. And in actual fact, that just doesn't work. So some points that I've not. We, as the university, we, doing tech transfer, we're part of a complex system. Tech transfer fits within the university's overall mission as part of the dissemination machinery. And I think that's actually quite important. Because over the 18 years I've been doing this, I've heard people talk about commercialization as a new mission of the university as a third leg to the university's objectives alongside research and teaching. And I think that's a mistake. I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. Because when looked at through the lens of university knowledge dissemination, what you begin to see is instead of being a new uncomfortable thing being bolted on to the back end of the university, tech transfer is an actual fact, a fundamental part of why universities exist. I don't think you can be a proper university unless you're doing technology oblique knowledge transfer to get the university's knowledge out and put to use. We have a role to play in helping to achieve impact from university research. And that's important because everyone wants to see impact. However, we need external partners to make that happen. We as the university don't create the products. We don't create the jobs. It's the companies, it's entrepreneurs, it's our partners who actually go and create these. Our job, my job is in optimizing these channels. I mean, back to the diagram in that rectangular box, those channels through which knowledge flows are things that we as the university have a degree of control over. We can make them easier or harder. We can make them faster or slower. We can make them more expensive or less expensive. So we can play a very important role in optimizing the flow of knowledge into the hands of users. But that's really what the job is rather than trying to create the impact ourselves. And over the years, the licensing part, the licensing of intellectual property has been viewed as difficult. And it's really quite interesting. Go anywhere on the planet, and you will hear exactly the same war stories and the same horror stories, usually from people in industry. But these are also stories that have been told to the policymakers and the politicians. They say university is difficult to work with intellectual property. Oh, it's all too hard. University is really, really bad at this. And licensing is seen as something incredibly difficult. So we decided to take a step back and challenge this and adopt a different approach to licensing of intellectual property. And we call it easy access IP. Hopefully it does what it says on the 10. And it really started from the position that the university's mission is to create and disseminate knowledge. And we aim to transfer as much IP into usage as we can to create benefits for our partners, community, society and the economy. So you'll notice there isn't a dollar sign or a pound sign or a yen sign in that mission. It's not about making money. It's about maximizing the flow of university research outputs into use to maximize benefits for the community at large. And the adult, the approach we've adopted is that whilst all IP has inherent value, we believe that we're a university, of course, knowledge has inherent value, but only a small proportion has significant commercial potential. Only a small proportion has significant financial value to the university. And for that small proportion of intellectual property where you can see an obvious route to making money from it, we will seek to exploit it through the traditional commercialization routes, spin out companies, high value licenses, seeking to maximize the income from that small proportion of IP. However, for the other IP, the IP where frankly we can't see a route, an immediate route to making a million dollars from it, we've decided that we will seek to transfer it for free to partners who can tell us how they're going to use it to create some sort of social or economic benefit. I concluded, we concluded that the current model is inefficient and expensive. And just as background, I've been Vice President for Metric Surveys and Statistics for the US based Tech Transfer Association, AUTM, for the UK based association, for the European based association and now the Australasian based association. So I've seen the stats, I've seen the numbers that shows that the vast majority of intellectual property never makes any money. Only a very small proportion makes significant sums. However, the tech transfer model that has evolved over the years has a tendency to treat all IP as if it is valuable, that it might be valuable and let's treat it as if it's valuable until we can demonstrate otherwise. And what that's tended to do is to turn every tech transfer office into a weird broad based product development organization because we've got what about 100 invention disclosures per annum. And if your starting position is that every one of these might be the billion dollar idea, then you've got a responsibility to develop those hundred ideas to treat them as if they're valuable and to try and create more value from them to try and identify where the value is going to come from. That's 100 inventions per annum that we're getting across things as diverse as material science, quantum computing, software, divinity, the medical faculty, all sorts of stuff. And I don't know about anyone else on the line, but I don't think that we as a tech transfer office have the skill set to be able to do that justice. I don't think there's any organization on the planet that has the skill set to be able to do that development. And remember, that's 100 per annum. Once you have those multiplying over years, you'll be sitting as we are with something like 400 projects, 400 pieces of intellectual property. And if the expectation is that we're going to do a thorough job of developing and seeking to exploit every single one of those, I think you're doomed to failure. And the fact of the matter is that 95% of licensing income comes from 5% of IP. That's what the stats say. And it doesn't matter whether you're in this part of the world or you're in the US or Europe. The numbers are always the same. The IP income comes from big wins, big sort of lottery ticket wins. And the weird thing is that the 5% of IP that's most valuable tends to be the easiest to do deals on. Because when everyone recognizes that the IP is valuable, you tend to be in a professional negotiating scenario. The people that you're negotiating with see the value, you see the value. And while it's not simple, it's relatively straightforward to be able to come to some sort of agreement, some sort of deal. It's the IP where you don't know what the value is and you can't see a route to commercialization that tends to cause me, in my experience, all of the difficulties. If you can't see the route to commercialization, if you don't know what it's worth and yet you're trying to negotiate a licensing deal with someone else, you find yourself in this bizarre dialogue of the death where you don't know and they don't know. And so you're negotiating over something where neither side knows what the value is. And what tends to happen is that we set a price that's considered too high. We're always being criticized for overvaluing technology. We're always being criticized for being difficult to negotiate with. I have to admit over the years that I've been concerned that there's sometimes a bit of a culture of greed and fear in the tech transfer world. That we're terrified that we're not going to get a sufficient return from the technology. And so we're always pushing for higher and higher and higher values on the IP and that tends to alienate potential partners. So we've got licensing of IP basically creating obstacles to the flow of knowledge and what that means is that knowledge transfer knowledge exchange is not happening. The licensing process has become an obstacle to the flow of knowledge and that if you think back to my first couple of slides is the very very worst thing because our job or mission is to disseminate knowledge and if tech transfer becomes viewed as an obstacle to the flow of knowledge then what you've got is a part of the organization that's operating counter to the mission of your employer and I don't know about anyone else but that for me isn't a comfortable place to be because it can have career limiting implications. So we concluded that the process of commercializing the top 5 to 10 percent of IP is relatively straightforward and does generate returns. If you've got high value IP you can license it and you can make money from it. We all like these they work pretty well and when you do a good spin-out company or you do a high value license everyone ends up reasonably happy. It's the process of commercializing the rest of the IP that's difficult expensive and doesn't generate returns. So he said you know what let's just remove that obstacle and let's give that IP away for free. We concluded that license negotiations when they happen at all because most IP that's generated from universities you never get into a licensing negotiation you never have interest from industry at all. When you do get interest from industry the potential values are unclear the required development costs are unclear and everyone starts fighting with each other over what value they're going to add what value they're going to create and what the relative returns are going to be and what that tends to do is to to put the relationship up on a negative footing right from the start. You and the company you and the research user are on opposite sides of the table beating each other up over the value of this intellectual property which in reality we all know that no one knows what the value is. So we decided that with easy access IP relationship start out positively we are saying we want you research user to be a partner to take our intellectual property to take a research outputs and do something wonderful with them. If you go and make a huge amount of money that's fantastic we will applaud celebrate and look for an ongoing relationship with you and the thing is as well that when you're giving the IP away for free the company will usually want to sustain and grow the relationship. Most companies understand that working the IP without the inventor is virtually impossible and therefore you've got the scope to be able to introduce all sorts of other knowledge transfer channels back to that rectangular box again. Consultants, ARC linkages, student placements, student employment, training for the company all these mechanisms that we have in place for working with companies that tend not to have the negative baggage that tends to be associated with licensing. And also we concluded that these relationships with the research users are the ones that will lead to ongoing relationships ongoing research and those are the ones that will lead to the big wins in the future. And most importantly is getting the university's knowledge out there to be used. It's achieving, it's in line with, it's helping with the university's mission. We don't give it away for free by throwing in a skip in the middle of the quadrangle letting people just scoop it up. It's a one page license agreement. The company has to commit to create benefits from the intellectual property they have to tell us how they're going to use it what they're going to do with it what the benefits are going to be. They can impede our ability to do research in that area. They've got a three-year exclusive license in which to demonstrate that they've done something. At the end of three years if they've done something I'll assign the IP to them for free otherwise I reserve the right to take it back. And number four is I think the most important one. The company has to agree to acknowledge the university's contribution in the successful exploitation of the intellectual property. So what we're doing is we're moving from a finance driven model to a reputation driven model. Giving IP for free to people who will hopefully create benefits from it and then we get the reputational boost from being associated with lots and lots of successful commercialization. And we reckon that the trade-off in terms of reputation versus potential income from the IP turns out very positively. Anyone who's heard me speak I always come to the fact that while in the business world reputation follows money in the university sector money follows reputation. So if you have a reputation for doing excellent research that's relevant to the outside world and you're good to do business with then you will attract the best staff, the best students and the best research partners and that's what drives universities and that's what success looks like for universities. And it's also about challenging the demand side. I'm sick and tired of the university being blamed for the lack of flow of knowledge into industry. Industry always says oh the universities they make it too difficult they over negotiate, they overvalue. We're now saying you know what we are removing those obstacles. We've removed the price question, we've removed the bureaucracy question. So how about industry? You now step up and come and work with us. We're finding that's working. So far we've had a very positive response from virtually all communities. We've done nine easy access deals on 15 technologies. I think that might now actually be 11 and 19. We have received a significant increase in the number of companies coming to speak to us about working with us. We saw this as a key indicator from the outset. Whether they come and speak to us about the IP that's available for free or they just want to speak to us about the model that we're developing or they want to come and speak to us about research, those are the conversations that will drive knowledge transfer going forward. Getting more companies speaking to more researchers is a primary measure of what we're trying to do. We're seeing research opportunities develop. We've refreshed, that's a euphemism obviously, relationships with existing partners. Companies that we had relationships with who were really quite unhappy because they felt that every opportunity the tech transfer office was trying to screw them over for money, money, money. The response from the business community has been very positive and I think we have established ourselves as a university that wants to do business with business. Entrepreneurs are now coming to speak to us. Students are coming to speak to us. Business is coming to speak to us about ways in which we can work together and ultimately that's what our job is because that's the mechanism through which knowledge is going to flow out into use. It's an experiment. I did my PhD in physical organic chemistry so I am an experimentalist at heart just seeing what happens when you remove all the obstacles, when you remove all the things that people say are causing the problems. Does this result in an increased flow of knowledge because really only one of two things can happen. Either nothing happens and that proves that all these obstacles that people pointed to in terms of overvaluation and over negotiation weren't the real problem at all. They were just symptoms or excuses or we're going to see much more IP being put to use by companies leading to innovation, economic growth and all these other impacts that we're talking about earlier. And we think we've struck the right balance. A commercial approach to a small proportion of valuable IP, easy access IP for the rest, getting more knowledge put to use. It reduces our costs, increases the amount of knowledge flowing and it lets business get to work on creating value from the intellectual property rather than spending months and months and months negotiating with us. It's helped raise our profile. I would like to think it's putting the university sector into a positive light that we are seeing is trying to make things happen, trying to address issues that people talk about and that is going to create value and be seen to help the economy. And I'll finish there and thank you for listening. Thanks very much Kevin. That's an absolutely inspiring overview of the work happening there and particularly your attitude there that the real goal in this process is for the knowledge to be used and that all the licensing or the different technology transfer things that we use are sort of means to that goal and that's really been able to, I think, let you have a not a revolutionary approach but certainly a refreshing approach. We're into the discussion part of our webinar today. We've got a question coming from Kathy Miller. We might try and get Kathy's microphone up. Just a reminder to anyone who's on the call today, there is a little question module where you can write in a question and that will allow you to participate in the discussion. So Kathy, can you hear me and can we hear you as the second question? Yeah, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. What was your question, Kathy? Excellent. I just wanted to thank you Kevin first for a really clear talk. That was great. I think I already know the answer to my question. I'm just wondering if the model that you're working with extends at all to licensing research data to other research institutions or researchers who can make use of it in their research? Yes. I can't see any reason why that wouldn't happen. In actual fact, we have done a couple of easy access IP licenses to other research institutions. We've actually licensed IP and technology to other universities. So I can't see why that wouldn't be the case for research data as well. Okay, thanks very much. Thanks, Kathy. Kevin, just on that, could you give us an idea of what kind of, they're not objects, but let's just pretend they were objects. If I were to walk into the easy IP shop at UNSW, what kind of objects is it that, what kind of objects are they that you're making available to people? The technology, if you could give us an example, what do you mean? Yeah, it's a diverse range of things. The first easy access IP deal that we did over here was a piece of software. It was an algorithm for predicting the flow of wind over geographical surfaces. And this was licensed to a company that's in the business of designing wind farms. They obviously have an interest in being able to monitor and predict what the wind speed is going to be at any given time based upon the geographical terrain that they're on and the weather forecast. And for me, this is a classic. I mean, how do you commercialize that? We've absolutely no idea what the value would be. And so what we did was we licensed it to this company and they're now building that algorithm into the design of wind farms that they sell commercially. And we are continuing to do work with them in terms of developing research based upon that piece of work. But there's everything from those sorts of algorithms through what's called the beatbox, which is a codename Hart Eski. It's a little device for keeping donor organs viable for longer. Apparently the biggest cause of organ donation failure is that the organ doesn't get to the transplantee soon enough. And what we've got is something that will keep hearts and livers and kidneys and everything viable for much, much longer. So everything from a spark plug for a scramjet through the beatbox, through the wind prediction algorithm. If you do a Google search on UNSW Easy Access IP, it will take you straight to the list. I think we've got about 12 up on the list at the moment. The latest one that went up, that was really cool, was a device that goes inside a helmet that simulates movement. So it gives you the feeling that your head is moving despite the fact that it isn't. So if you think of applications for that in things like interactive gaming, etc, that's got a lot of potential. But we can't see a route to commercializing it, making a million dollars right off the bat. So what we're doing is seeking a partner who will be able to come along and develop that with us and turn it into a useful product. All right, so then to get back to circle back again to Kathy's question. Do you think this framework that you've got that sort of relies on an assumption that 95 percent of the IP is actually more valuable when it's used than when it's tried to be negotiated over? Do you think that has an application to the data outputs of research at the university and has that ever come through your office yet? No, it hasn't come through our office, but you know, I can't see any practical or philosophical reason why you couldn't apply exactly the same approach to data sets. Certainly, it's your approach which is really refreshing that sort of says, okay let's turn this around and say that it's far more efficient for us to get stuff being used and in our sort of particular focus it's about data. So, and we assume that again we'll just assume that your figures kind of apply across to the data field that 95 percent of it is actually the idea of licensing is it is not necessarily to stop people from using it, but the reason why we'd want to apply a license to data is to to give people confidence that they can use it. So kind of turning the licensing thing on its head by saying by doing this where we're providing clarity and ease and less friction in the system and a quicker path to reuse. So I really like your model and I think it you know it certainly looks like it has a application over the data side of the outputs. Yeah and it's also you know challenging the potential users to tell you what they're going to do with it because that's the number one condition that we apply. You can't just have this IP for free, you have to tell us what you're going to do with it, what you're going to use it for and so having that clarity and as you say the permission to use it yeah it sounds good. Perhaps the data, well anyway we have to see how it applies there but the data word is probably slightly more open even than that in that we want to kind of proactively get the stuff out there and say look if you've got a use for this we you know rest assured that it's open, the terms of use are clear and you know we usually go for you know a kind of an attribution requirement that says that when it is used then you know we need to be attributed. What I was just going to ask a question about collaboration Baden, feel free to chime in whenever you want Baden but the question about collaboration what what value do you put on the university only, not a monetary value but you know how important it is is it in the kind of out the measuring of your outputs that you've been able to increase collaborative opportunities. That's the key performance indicator when I arrived I mean our office was like many tech transfer offices where what was counted, what performance was measured on was number of disclosures, number of patents, number of licenses and royalty income we've changed that round to say what we now see is important is the extent of engagement between the university and outside world and the growth of the university's overall research business. I mean success for us is more IP being used by these partners leading to collaborative opportunities and collaborative research leading to a growth in the research portfolio of the university. That's when UNSW is happy. We've got some questions here from Catherine Baden anything before I go to Catherine Catherine, do you have a question? Yeah thanks Adrienne I think there's a couple of things that come out of Kevin's talk and I'm really glad we were able to grab them to come in and share this on a webinar. If I go back five or six years probably seven years or even eight years and I look at the work that was done by the Queensland Government when they were developing the GILF framework, the Government Information Licensing Framework. A lot of research was done as to how information was handled in the Queensland Government and how it was licensed and what was licensed and it's it's ironic that very similar figures came out of that report as what Kevin has realized there. I mean in those days the Queensland Government I suppose it was probably a little bit more rudimentary back then that perhaps one could do now but about 80, 20 was the position that the Queensland Government talk about information that could be openly licensed and we're talking about information they're not necessarily data specifically but about 80, 20 and that's one of the reasons why the Osgoal Framework has endured through to this day because it's the proposition I think that could be made for all governments in fact almost a lot of organisations in fact. So I highlight the similarity of what Kevin's found here to the position that we took in developing the GILF framework 30 years ago but that said I think a lot of similarities come out of what Kevin had said I think if I just change the odd word here or there I could make the same presentation around open access to government data and access to government information even down to things like value and what we're seeing now is almost all of the economists agree that unlike everything else that we value in society and even small children take this view that scarcity is the primary motivating factor for establishing value you know it happens in the school yard you can't have this because it's mine and because it's mine I have a greater value I have the ability to leverage the value of that thing and that's been happening for years in government it's been happening for years in university but what we're seeing now is economic realisation that in fact if you open things up that's when you increase the value because on tight Greg. So Baden surely you're not hinting that government departments behave like children in a school yard. Nor am I nor am I suggesting that universities are. But what I am saying is that we're seeing a shift from saying that value is in locking things up to value is in opening things up and you know I don't think Kevin would have any issue with me saying this but Kevin and I have had a meeting already and we've been discussing this the position that we've always taken with Osgoal is that it's a national licensing framework for open access to publicly funded information and that includes all sorts of things including publicly funded research and innovation and if we take that view in terms of managing Osgoal I know my board agrees that you know we ought to be as a framework maintaining a watching brief on what's happening in there making sure the framework in fact does meet the needs of those that have publicly funded information and so we're working already with Ken and his group at New South Innovations and I'm very pleased to say that very soon we'll be applying the easy access IP licenses or a standard derivative that we'll agree upon to be part of the Osgoal licensing framework. We see this as an important initiative sorry go ahead no that's right I just thought we might go see with a Catherine what shows on the line she had a question about royalties and something about legal terms Catherine are you there would that be a perhaps Catherine is yes can we hear Catherine on the microphone or perhaps I will read her question out Catherine Catherine can you hear us or can we hear you as the question hello Catherine she can hi hello Catherine yes is your question Catherine um well the first question is is is it possible to have a view of the one page agreement I would understand if you don't want to share and the other question is when the the the work is shared with a company if the company develops that product is and there's royalties coming up is the university having a share of that does that make sense yeah to answer those in order if you ping me your email address I'll be happy to to get Tim who's the easy access IP project manager to get in touch to let you see the license because I have absolutely no issue with sharing at all okay it is a one pager it's technically one page plus one line and just so you understand I was told that you had to have a piece of the contract on the same page as the signature box and therefore the lawyers actually had to make it go over onto the next page so we could fit the signature box onto the second page but no issue with sharing that at all if the company goes off and develops a product based on our IP and they generate income there is no obligation on them at all to give us anything um what we want is recognition attribution and acknowledgement for our contribution um but there is no financial obligation on them to give us anything at all trust me though if they go and make a billion dollars our foundation people will be all over them like a rash looking for buildings to be built or endowments or the moral obligation will be enormous and the the reason of my question is because I noticed that some of the already available easy access IP on the web are health patents and so I was wondering how you were handling patents if you give it over to a company that must be really interesting um what happens is that initially we give them a three-year license on the patent so they have to to take on all future IP protection costs we don't ask them for back-dated IP protection costs if they want to keep the patent they have to fund it if after three years they can demonstrate they've done something with the IP at that point I'll assign the patents to them again free of charge okay um may I ask one last question sure go ahead Catherine sure um have you because they are free have you ever considered uh placing them under a creative commons license um sort of yes but we've decided that just to press ahead with the easy access IP experiment first you know just to see what happens with this one page license agreement that we've developed okay and that's a that's a question I've asked myself in fact is why wouldn't I what why would I bother to incorporate the easy access IP licenses into the osgoal framework when I have a creative commons attribution license I think the answer is this the easy access IP license is really directed towards the movement of IP into towards a patent sphere there are specific clauses and I appreciate probably haven't seen them yet that concern specifically patents and patent applications that's not necessarily the license I would choose if I was simply going to be transferring data around but the transfer of data or other materials with a view to making something patentful in some circumstances I think requires some of these extra clauses and that's why we'll be including them into the osgoal framework the other aspect of course is that the default easy access IP license is exclusive indeed okay well thanks very much Catherine that was a quite thought-provoking it might be time for us to move over to our update from osgoal Baden what's been happening since last we met at our last webinar what's what's new in the world of osgoal at the moment I'm very glad you asked that question actually I'm just it's just unfortunate you've asked enough just lost the page in trying to move the webinar around my screen I'll just try and grab it right let's start with the website have you got have you got anything new on the website strange you ask we do in fact look a couple of webinar presentations ago I think we talked about a survey that we were going to conduct or a I suppose an avenue for you to submit questions about frequently asked questions on data and data licensing with respect to to research and so I'm glad to say that it's been now completed and it's available on the osgoal website under the research tab if you go to and then you click on the research tab you'll find two sub pages the first sub page concerns the the FAQs and there's around about 20 I think 19 or 20 FAQs that we've answered there majority of them specifically relating to research and research data there's also now a provision on the site for you to submit further questions that you would like answered so they only ask two things Alex has got that up on the screen now the osgoal site is that the right spot okay excellent yep so you can see there that if you click on the word form it will take you to our form and that will lodge your FAQ directly to me and others at hands and we'll be notified of your question we only ask for your email address just because we may need to contact you directly with a response if you request a direct response or to obtain further information about your questions so that we could give a more well-rounded answer in respect to those FAQs so that was a piece of work I think we've picked that off as being done of course we're very happy and delighted with the way the licensing webinars have been going and have been able to record onto their YouTube site and data I think is the YouTube address A-N-D-S-D-A-T-A we've taken some shortcuts to the relevant licensing webinars that have been published on there and we've made them available as well under the osgoal research tab and this indeed this particular webinar is being recorded and it will go up there as soon as Ann's release that as well so up the top of the page I suppose it goes without saying but if you've got anything or anyone you'd like us to include in a webinar on any topic let us know happy to understand what other things you'd like to hear about so those are the two new pieces of information we've got there now if I could just try to minimize this on my screen again how here we go cc version four you're all probably wondering we had Diane Peters here on the last occasion and we haven't seen cc version four come out yet and you'd be right all all the good things come with time I understand from speaking with cchq this week that they are very very close to release they couldn't give me an actual date or a time but they said they're very very close so watch this space and as soon as they are released of course we'll be examining them as we are with the easy access IP license and incorporating them into the osgoal framework some announcements from the from the various governments if you happen to be dealing with governments as part of research stuff the Queensland Government had their opening the vault day the other day in the Queensland Performing Arts Centre the message for the Premier there is that open access to IP is the way they are going there is an Assistant Minister that has been appointed to ensure that the Queensland Government does move towards this way the Queensland Government whole of government IP policy has just been amended to be osgoal centric and we're very pleased to see that and so that's the document that will be guiding all of the agencies as they as they commence the further work I suppose in terms of opening the access to the data equally Victorian Government IP principles were released not so long ago the guidelines for each of the government departments are how to apply open licenses to their material has also just been I suppose signed off on it hasn't been published yet but it has been signed off we'll be having copies of all these materials placed up onto the osgoal website when it's reformed I'll talk about that in just a moment Western Australia has also now given public endorsement of the osgoal program and also has changed its whole of government IP policy to reflect that it's now permitting West Australian public servants to apply osgoal stuff we're going to be doing some implementation work with the West Australian Government I'm sure as the year progresses so stay tuned and if you are doing any business with any of these agencies and you are interested to know about what licensing is happening please feel free to give us a call we are in the process as well of arranging for osgoal practitioner groups to be commenced in each of these jurisdictions now that these positions have been taken so we're looking forward to doing a lot more work there not only with government but with people who are interacting with government if you happen to have a very good travel budget and I know some people in universities like Kevin do have an excellent travel budget there's there's a couple of international events that are coming up that you may be interested in on the 4th to the 8th of August in Buenos Aires is the biennial Creative Commons event basically everyone who is in Creative Commons leaves Mountain View, California and all their affiliate offices and their head to one spot and that's going to be Buenos Aires this year again on the 4th, 8th of August Sounds like a Creative Commons carnival is that right? It's going to be a love-in yes it's very much the event that they look forward to every couple of years so of course this year there'll be a lot to do I suspect with the release of the new version for licenses that and a lot of work as well that Creative Commons is doing ancillary to its licensing work for example they are leading a group called the Open Policy Network which is effectively a lot of organizations that are custodians of open access policies all around the world Osgoal is a foundation member of the OPN and we look forward to working with them as that progresses the other thing too is that Ok, we're going from carnival in Buenos Aires to beer drinking in Germany is that right? Well look who said open licensing was a boring had to be a really boring exosong it doesn't have to be so Geneva no Geneva in September Oktoberfest is what's happening there and the other thing too part of the Osgoal program that we're working on is some federation of Australia's data portals now a lot of the government jurisdictions are developing data portals you would have seen data.qld I suppose is the most recently released one we're working to federate all of those data portals together we've got a large meeting cross federation happening on the 15th of April next Monday in fact so we'll have more news about what we're going to be doing there after that event and the other thing too is we've now got some we're working out some hard figures in terms of Cal royalties that are being paid by schools because of access the way that government materials have not been licensed openly I suppose you could suggest where a government has a website a department has a website or it has materials that are downloadable from that website and schools reuse that materials for educational and teaching purposes they pay a royalty on that it's looking at around about three and a half million for just accessing just web pages alone that's not dealing with the downloads from the actual site so we're going to be doing a lot more work with the education sector in particular as well where we're looking at open educational resource policy so I hope in a little while to be able to announce another element to our program that we'll see Osgoal in the education a figure I suppose in the education sector as well as in government as well as attaching on to all the work we're doing with the innovation and research communities that's a good fight I think that's probably about it for me for the moment yeah they're very interesting on the copyright fees area in that I would have thought that across the government systems in Australia you know all the different jurisdictions the different licensing between levels of government and even within the same government within the same department sometimes all that inefficiency of transaction and actual fees as well would really justify the existence of Osgoal about a thousand times I'd imagine as far as an implementation and then a return on investment for the system so we hope that one gets some legs Braden well we've just we've done some back of the back of the packet sort of figures you know even if we only save one million dollars to the education sector around the country by introducing or prosecuting further open licensing in government then that's the equivalent to five years of operating cost the Osgoal program so yes and think of if we can save 10 million which is what we're thinking about it's around about 60 years worth that's lots of carnivals and lots of autofests actually perhaps I won't be going to the of course but put it the other way you know that's extra teachers that we could be teaching our kids instead of you know paying license fees for educational materials so you know terrific I think that's probably as much as we have time for this week I'll just draw peoples this time the draw your attention to our next licensing webinar which will be on Thursday June the 20th so in a couple of months again if you've got any ideas or things you'd like to hear about don't hesitate to contact us at and that's probably best services at and or you can contact Osgoal as well there's other webinars as well if you have other interests we've got a thing coming up on awkward which is identifying researchers across information systems through sort of global identifiers so awkward that's on April the 23rd and we've got an interesting data citation series of webinars coming up so there's a kind of data citation 101 webinar on Tuesday April the 30th first if you go to ands.org.au slash events to have a look at that or just go to the ands website and follow the easy to find ands events tab there we have a quite a set of different webinars coming through there and as I said very keen to get your input if you've got any other ideas Kevin thank you so much for that really inspiring technology transfer view it's just the way you've turned things on the head there just absolutely amazing if people want to get in contact with you Kevin or to find out more about that what would be the best the email address it's on the final slide okay just like that good good k.calanaansinnovations.com.au okay and is there a website that is your home for innovations we have that up on the screen aren't we efficient nsinnovations.com.au terrific that's the one that's the one and Baden where do we follow you where's the best place to follow your your progress in osgoal at osgoal on twitter is probably the most update one we've got one thing I didn't mention is we're about to embark upon a large-scale rebuild of our website and we're going to be having jurisdictional pages so each government jurisdiction will have its own page on osgoal you'll be able to access all the appropriate policy documents that are there that the government departments ought to be operating under and as well we are about to produce a data set that will be published on the website that will indicate all the government departments and whether they are openly licensed at this point in time or not and any other relevant matters we point out about the copyright status of the materials terrific all right thank you very much and thanks to our great audience the participation was terrific today we've got some great questions there and it's much appreciated all right well so we'll see you at our next webinar licensing is in on june the 20th thanks very much everyone we'll see you soon thank you bye bye ta-dam thank you bye