New ECCO model documents for Material Deposit and Transfer Agreements in compliance with the Nagoya Protocol

The European Culture Collections’ Organisation presents two new model documents for Material Deposit Agreement (MDA) and Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) designed to enable microbial culture collection leaders to draft appropriate agreement documents for, respectively, deposit and supply of materials from a public collection. These tools provide guidance to collections seeking to draft an MDA and MTA, and are available in open access to be used, modified, and shared. The MDA model consists of a set of core fields typically included in a ‘deposit form’ to collect relevant information to facilitate assessment of the status of the material under access and benefit sharing (ABS) legislation. It also includes a set of exemplary clauses to be included in ‘terms and conditions of use’ for culture collection management and third parties. The MTA model addresses key issues including intellectual property rights, quality, safety, security and traceability. Reference is made to other important tools such as best practices and code of conduct related to ABS issues. Besides public collections, the MDA and MTA model documents can also be useful for individual researchers and microbial laboratories that collect or receive microbial cultures, keep a working collection, and wish to share their material with others.