Data use agreement (DUA)

A data use agreement (DUA) is a contract under which one party shares data with another for a defined purpose, setting the permitted uses, the security and privacy conditions, the term, and what happens to the data when the work ends.

How it works in a university-industry collaboration

DUAs appear whenever data, rather than materials or money, is what moves. The best-known form is the HIPAA data use agreement, required when a covered entity shares a limited data set of health information for research (45 CFR 164.514(e)), but the same instrument covers a company sharing operating data with a lab, a university sharing survey data with a sponsor, or two institutions pooling datasets. It answers questions a research agreement usually doesn't: who may access the data, whether it may be combined with other data, whether individuals could be re-identified, where it may be stored, and whether it must be returned or destroyed.

Data clauses are now part of the main negotiation too. The UIDP Contract Accords added an accord on data because sponsors and universities kept discovering, after signing, that they disagreed about who owned a dataset and who could reuse it. Federally funded research adds the NIH's Data Management and Sharing Policy, which expects data to be shared, so a sponsor's wish to keep a dataset confidential has to be reconciled with the university's obligations before the project starts.

Translation Box: data use agreement

On the academic side: a compliance document, often triggered by the IRB or the privacy office, and a reminder that data from human subjects carries obligations no sponsor can waive.

On the industry side: the data is a competitive asset and the worry is leakage. The useful move is to separate the raw data (restricted) from the derived results (publishable), and write both into the agreement.

What Helikon does with it

A Helikon project records a data use agreement as its agreement type where that's the governing document, and keeps the signed copy and its dates with the project's contract files.