Consortium agreement

China

Beijing

You are strongly advised to make a consortium agreement for co-operation projects, whether this is mandatory in the regulations or not. The consortium agreement sets out rights and administrative, financial and legal obligations between the project partners. Project Desk has a number of standard consortium agreements which can be used templates.

It is important that arrangements in the consortium agreement are in line with the rights and obligations of the grant agreement and conditions of funding. Make sure that arrangements are in place for:

Responsibilities of the Parties.
Governance structure for decision-making.
Financial provisions for inter alia payments.
Non-disclosure of information.
Intellectual property rights.
Right to publish and use of the results.
Liability toward each other.
Applicable law and the settlement of disputes.

If another partner is acting as co-ordinator of the project, Project Desk can check that the arrangements are made in accordance with the above list, and that they guarantee your interests as researchers and those of RSM (and by implication EUR).

After the consortium agreement is drawn up, you should be certain that all consortium partners are in agreement before it is signed by an authorised signatory from each of the partners.

It can be a lengthy process to get consortium partners to agree about rights and obligations because they all have their own interests to protect. Industrial partners often want to maintain confidentiality of information, and so will disagree with universities about the intellectual property rights, for example. The Project Desk team can contact the grant provider or consortium partners to work towards agreed content and formulation. Where necessary they can also contact the EUR central legal department for advice, and to obtain permission for the agreement if it is to be signed by the Executive Board. Once again it is important to have the agreement signed in good time by the appropriate signatory. More information about these mandate rules is given in section 3.2 EUR mandate rules.