Legal support
Protect your knowledge
Not all research inventions and results require patenting, yet it may be necessary to protect your idea and knowledge prior to making it public. This is necessary to prevent others from exploiting your idea without your permission. In some instances, agreements should be made about intellectual property and the results to be generated. Some form of protecting your knowledge via a patent in the case of a collaboration may be important.
A patent is not the only way to protect your knowledge. A patent is a commercial monopoly aimed at preventing others from copying or plagiarising your work. Written scientific output is protected by copyright, as is software, and in most cases, this is all that is needed.
Filing a patent is time-consuming and requires insight, which VU IXA-GO can help you with. If you are unsure whether you need one, they can advise you on this and many other aspects of knowledge protection.
Privacy & GDPR
If, in your research, you work with data from a natural person, then you need to determine the privacy requirements regarding personal data. Personal data refers to any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject). These requirements are part of the GDPR and its Dutch implementation (AVG). The GDPR regulates the processing of personal data from natural persons, with processing referring to: collecting, adapting, storing, analysing and destroying. Although you are only preparing your proposal at this stage, privacy requirements are not something that you only think about after the publication of your research; rather, this needs to be done at an early stage so that necessary precautions can be taken.
If your research requires the collection of personal data, then we advise you to consider the 10 key rules for data processing.
Each faculty has at least one privacy champion in place, and this person should be your first point of contact for any questions related to privacy and the GDPR. The Privacy Champion can help you with, amongst other things, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), registering your processing activities via a DMP and/or the PrivacyPerfect application, informed consent forms, determining how sensitive your data is (and determining the measures necessary to protect your data) and any general question you have regarding privacy and the GDPR.