Federal IP Disclosure Obligations Training

As the academic year gets underway, the Technology Licensing Office (TLO) is sending our annual reminder on disclosure obligations for federally funded research — with this year's training dates. Our goal is simple: protect MIT's rights, meet our sponsor commitments, and keep your publishing and release timelines on schedule. Timely disclosure is a shared responsibility across faculty, postdocs, students, lab staff, and administrators. Four things to keep in mind this year Disclose early — ideally 6–8 weeks before public release. That means before manuscript submission, pre-prints, conference abstracts, thesis defenses, or public code repositories. Sharing to the public before disclosing to the TLO can affect patent rights, including forfeiture. Early disclosure lets us secure protection without slowing you down.Disclose all inventive outputs — not just patentable ones. Inventions, software code, algorithms, tangible research property/materials, and copyrightable works all require institutional disclosure through the Research@MIT. Open-source releases may require a software disclosure, and TLO can help with confirmation that no sponsor obligation conflicts with the release.Give us complete funding information at disclosure. Under the Bayh-Dole Act, MIT must report each subject invention to the federal funding agency within two months of your written disclosure to the TLO — and failure to report on time can mean MIT loses title to the government entirely. Full award numbers and sponsor details up front are what make accurate, on-time reporting possible.Tell us about outside collaborators. External co-inventors, visiting researchers, subcontractors, and foundation or industry support all affect ownership. All contributors to the ideas behind a disclosure should be named, even non-MIT personnel. Fall Training Federal IP & Disclosures 101 (1 hour) - A practical walk-through of the disclosure process, federal timelines, and sponsor compliance — built for researchers and administrators.