Submit intellectual property (IP)

4 MINUTE READ

An IP disclosure is a detailed written description of your idea or creation. It includes all the information we need to assess your IP’s ownership and commercialisation potential.

When you tell us about your creation, we can decide what to do next. With your input we can start the process to:

protect your IP
market your IP
commercialise IP.

How to submit an IP disclosure

To submit an IP disclosure:

Download the IP disclosure form.
Fill it in. You can get help to fill in the form from your Business Development team member.
Email the completed form to the contact address on the form.

Download the IP disclosure form

Why submit an IP disclosure?

As a researcher, you must disclose all new IPs to the University through your Business Development team member.

Telling us about the IP you create means we can help you protect your idea and develop it over time.

It also means you are less likely to do or say anything that could harm the value of your IP in the future.

When to submit the IP disclosure form

You need to disclose your IP whenever you have discovered or created something unique that could:

have commercial value
solve a significant problem
be made into a product or service by an industry partner.

Tell us about your IP before you:

publish
present it at a conference
send out a press release
talk to anyone outside the University.

If you don’t, this could mean you can’t take your idea to market later.

The best time to disclose is early, at the draft manuscript stage. Ideally, this is months before communicating your IP to anyone outside the University, especially prospective investors.

Make sure you tell us about any imminent or prior public disclosure of the IP.

Doing an IP search

The University intellectual property (IP) disclosure form asks you to list existing patents related to your creation. These are called 'prior art'.

A full and comprehensive search by a patent attorney can take weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars. As a researcher and IP creator, you can do a useful preliminary IP search yourself in a few minutes.

This is often a valuable exercise for researchers. You can often find many research outputs in patents that you can't find elsewhere. For example, in general peer-reviewed research publications and literature.

Like in a survey of the technical literature, the key to a useful IP search is the choice of keywords or search terms. As the IP creator, you are well placed to identify the keywords that best describe your creation.

Search the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patentscope database or a general search engine. Add the word ‘patent’ to your keywords.

As well as helping you fill in the IP disclosure form, these searches may be useful for your research.

Things to watch out for

In most countries, a creator loses patent rights if the IP is publicly disclosed before filing the first (or ‘priority’) patent application in one country.

But in Australia (and the USA), there is a one-year grace period after publication when you can file a patent.

This period has major drawbacks, and it means you will also lose patent rights in many countries.

Your IP can be made public in ways you may not expect. For example:

If you apply for a grant from publicly funded grant providers in Australia, the grant reviewer must maintain confidentiality and not make the details of the application publicly available. Examples include the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council.
Reviewers for other funding bodies may not have the same obligations, and this might impact patentability. Successful grants or abstracts may be advertised online, so check what information in the grant application could become public.

Who to list on your IP disclosure

In your disclosure, you must list anyone who may have contributed to the ideas that led to the creation. They don’t need to be University employees or students. For example, they might be collaborators or visiting scientists.

We will identify the rights of all contributors and their institutions.

Talk to us about all your working relationships, ideally before they begin. We can help you understand the implications for any resulting IP.