The OpenMTA
Freedom from Friction!
We developed the OpenMTA to support the redistribution of biological materials. For both charitable and commercial purposes. The OpenMTA is a legal instrument designed for how biology actually moves between people.
Linda Kahl was the lead developer. The genius and sweat was hers. Linda drove the drafting, the negotiation, and the consensus-building across institutions that made the agreement real.
The drafting effort ran via the BioBricks Foundation and Stanford, in partnership with OpenPlant at Cambridge and the John Innes Centre, with input from many others. The original team published the agreement in 2018.
Infrastructure for Sharing!
The OpenMTA matters because most material transfer agreements don't allow sharing.
The UBMTA, the dominant MTA, restricts redistribution and commercial use. That restriction is a tax on sharing. A tax that slows distribution and innovation. A tax that blocks downstream reuse. A tax that makes open collections like Addgene, FreeGenes, and iGEM harder to sustain than they should be. And a tax that quietly assumes the next user is a problem to be managed rather than a colleague to be trusted.
No Taxation!
The OpenMTA removes the materials transfer tax. Materials can move. Recipients can share onward. Commercial use is allowed. The legal scaffolding finally matches how distributed bioengineering actually works.
You can read more about the OpenMTA in several places.
(1) "Opening options for material transfer," is the open-access article at Nature Biotechnology (2018) by the original drafting team. Free online here.
(2) The "What is the OpenMTA?" webpage at Addgene.org. Free online here. Addgene also hosts the text with one instance of the OpenMTA, for which two additional terms are added in Section III.
(3) The "OpenMTA" explainer at OpenPlant.org. Free online here.
Get Going!
The default way to use the OpenMTA is to get the provider and the recipient of materials to agree. Fill out the form, select a few options, and sign. That is it.
A PDF of the blank canonical OpenMTA is held by the Stanford Digital Repository here. DOI: 10.25740/bx753gz8690. The DOI is the durable address. Use it. Lab webpages come and go. The repository will outlast all of us.
In some cases a "unilateral" OpenMTA may be useful. The unilateral does not require signatures. It greatly reduces administrative burden. Useful for distributing standard parts at scale. An example of the unilateral in use can be found here.
So What?
Tools shape practice.
A material transfer agreement is a small tool that shapes a large practice.
The OpenMTA was built so that biology can be shared the way knowledge is shared.
Freely, with attribution, across borders, between strangers who trust each other enough to try.
Enjoy!