Brunswick Templates

Research Collaboration Agreements

The Academic Research Collaboration Agreement has been designed to be suitable for most cases where two or more universities receive a grant from a research council or charity. Occasionally a different arrangement will be required, but in the absence of special circumstances it is expected that one of the Brunswick Agreements will be used with no or minimal changes. Where changes are made, it is helpful to highlight these when issuing the agreement to speed up review.

2025 Brunswick Research Collaboration Agreement

The 2025 version of the Research Collaboration Agreement provides a substantive update to areas such as data protection and trusted research which have developed significantly since the last version.

Earlier Research Collaboration Templates

Short Form Joint Award Letter
This simple letter is designed to be issued by a lead institution to provide funding and to bind a collaborating co-applicant institution into the terms of a research council’s or research charity’s terms and conditions. It is intended that the Short Form Joint Award Letter should govern collaborations which are funded by research councils and charities where:

the award is made for a research project (not a Centre) under standard terms;
the collaborators are academic or non-profit making institutions;
the collaborating institutions are named in the application as undertaking a specific and significant proportion of the project; and
the terms of the award do not restrict the universities’ ownership or publication of

Grant Joint Award Agreement (Brunswick Long Form Agreement)
The Grant Joint Award Agreement is designed to be used in funded collaborations where some more complex issues may need to be catered for, such as establishing project management groups, the introduction and use of valuable intellectual property and particular confidentiality or publication concerns. This does not deal with all eventualities and may need to be amended in response to specific circumstances

Confidentiality Agreements

• Confidentiality Agreement (2 way)

• Confidentiality Agreement (3 way)

Material Transfer & Human Tissue Agreements

The Material Transfer Agreement is designed to balance the needs of both the donor and recipient organisations. It is reasonable to expect that for routine transfers of materials, universities should be prepared to sign up to identical terms for both incoming and outgoing transfers. It is therefore expected that in the vast majority of cases, parties will be able to sign up to the terms without modification, regardless of whether they are the donor or recipient.

The approach is deliberately minimal and is not intended to cater for all situations. For instance, it is not suitable for use where human tissue is being transferred or situations where there is known to be an IP position that needs careful treatment. The inclusion of onerous IP terms “just in case IP is an issue” has been avoided.

This agreement is not designed for use between universities and commercial organisations. A template Human Tissue MTA was produced under the original Brunswick Group initiative.

• Template Material Transfer Agreement (Word document)

• Template Human Tissue MTA (Word document)

The Brunswick Studentship agreement is for use between a university and a company for the support of a postgraduate research student.

Lambert Agreements and toolkit

We have created this toolkit for universities and companies that wish to undertake collaborative research projects with each other. The toolkit consists of:

• Set of 5 model research collaboration (one to one) agreements

• 4 Consortium (multi-party) agreements

• Decision guide

• Guidance documents

The Lambert Working Group on Intellectual Property (IP) prepared the toolkit.  The objectives of the toolkit are to:

• Facilitate negotiations between potential collaborators

• Reduce the time and effort required to secure agreement

• Provide examples of best practice

GCRF Collaboration Agreement

• GCRF Template collaboration Agreement

• GCRF Template collaboration Agreement – track changes that have been made to adapt this from the Brunswick long-form agreement

The Brunswick Templates Working Group

ARMA intends to establish a new Working Group to be responsible for continual improvement of the templates with consultation from across the sector.

Please watch this space for further information.

Other Resources

Please find below some articles, websites and information that may be of interest:

• Report on Managing Research Contracts, carried out by Research Consulting for the Brunswick Group (October 2013), with a further report from 2018 here Enhancing practice in research contracts – Kudos: Growing the influence of research and an update in 2023 here Research Contracts Benchmarking 2023 – Research Consulting

• Guidance notes are available here