About Desca

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NEW - Consultation on the revision of DESCA 2.0

DESCA published a Model for Material Transfer Agreement.

DESCA* is a comprehensive, modular consortium agreement for the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Initiated by key FP7 stakeholder groups, and co-developed with the FP community, it offers a reliable frame of reference which seeks to balance the interests of all of the main participant categories in FP research projects: large and small firms, universities, public research institutes and RTOs. You will find here a PowerPoint Presentation with the basic facts about DESCA.

Since FP6, Consortium Agreements are mandatory for most FP-funded research projects. The purpose of a consortium agreement is to regulate critical aspects of project governance not covered by the grant agreement between the Commission and the project consortium. Key aspects covered in consortium agreements are typically:

• the internal organisation of the consortium (e.g. membership of management bodies, voting rights, settlement of disputes between partners);
• the distribution of the Community financial contribution (e.g. when should the project coordinator distribute advance payments from the Commission to the other partners?);
• management of intellectual property and access rights to results (e.g. when, and on what terms, should access to results be provided to other partners and their affiliates?)
• liability and confidentiality arrangements between partners (e.g. the extent of liability of the partners to one another and towards third parties)

DESCA is intended as a reliable frame of reference enjoying broad support within the FP community. In FP6, many different groups produced their own model consortium agreement to fit the particular circumstances of the particular group. Some users then compiled what looked like the “best bits” from different models and sometimes got internally inconsistent documents as a result.

The DESCA project has tried to bring together all of the key groups involved in producing FP6 model consortium agreements, with the aim of producing one consistent modular agreement for FP7 which balances the interests of all key player categories, in the spirit of “Responsible Partnering” (www.responsible-partnering.org).

DESCA is also a much simplified consortium agreement compared to many of the FP6 models. Inexperience and caution then encouraged prudence and sometimes over-precision. Now, with the benefit of experience, DESCA offers a model stripped of unnecessary complexity in both content and language.

DESCA is not an inflexible straightjacket, however. On issues where different project types (e.g. large long-term multi-partner consortia as compared with close-to-market SME-centred projects) or different actor categories (e.g. research-oriented universities as compared with application-focussed enterprises) typically involve clearly different interests, DESCA offers variant options for clauses around its core text. Great care has gone into making sure that these variants remain consistent with the core text. DESCA users remain free, of course, to make their own adaptations.

DESCA is also intended as an educational exercise. It comes with guidance notes to help research managers without legal training as well as first-time FP participants to recognise key issues for them and to make informed choices about the best wording to protect their interests.

Contact for further information: Gerrit Bornemann, Helmholtz Brussels Office, +32 (2) 5000979

*DEvelopment of a Simplified Consortium Agreement for FP7
**DESCA was initiated by ANRT (www.anrt.asso.fr), the German CA-Team (represented by Helmholtz - www.helmholtz.de and KoWi - www.kowi.de), EARTO (www.earto.eu), Eurochambres (www.eurochambres.be), and UNITE (www.unite.be)