What is MTAShare?
To address the tremendous administrative burden and financial cost associated with managing the hundreds of thousands of Material Transfer Agreements ("MTAs") processed annually between universities and other nonprofit research institutions, Vanderbilt developed a comprehensive, scalable automated system for processing and managing MTAs. This system is known as MTAShare. Vanderbilt and Inteum ( https://www.inteum.com/mtashare/) have partnered to make MTAShare available to the entire nonprofit research community.
Key Benefits of MTAShare
- Shortens MTA transaction times
- Reduces administrative burden
- Empowers researchers
- Eliminates unnecessary review and negotiation
- Increases feedback and tracking
- Introduces transparency
- Provides analytics on MTA processing
- Fewer opportunities for error
- Can be used internationally
- Helps identify export control issues
- Saves on transaction costs
How does MTAShare work?
MTAShare utilizes nationally accepted standard MTAs - the UBMTA, the SLA and the Open MTA, as well as the AUTM derivatives of the UBMTA that were developed for non-standard materials such as human tissues and fluids, stem cells, chemicals, plants and the like. The providing or receiving scientist can initiate the MTA request by completing a short survey. Based on the survey answers, MTAShare creates an MTA using its built-in logic, and alerts the MTA administrative manager that a new request is ready for review and approval. Upon approval, MTAShare auto-signs the MTA for the provider and sends the MTA to the recipient for review and approval. The system alerts all stakeholders when MTAs are approved, and uploads the final documents to a system folder. The system has built-in administrative warnings for non-standard material requests, and even has export control search capabilities. MTAs can be processed in PDF form for emailing, or can utilize DocuSign for execution. Interested parties can access the brief MTAShare system video at the following link: https://www.inteum.com/mtashare/ .