There was a lack of knowledge about current safeguards and there was no spontaneous mention of ethical approval, hospital research governance procedures or the contractual obligations of the researchers by the participants.
Our results indicate that ignoring personal contractual arrangements with individual researchers, as the previous literature does, amounts to overlooking at least 50% of university industry interactions.
Because of the politically sensitive nature of phytosanitary or trade regulations based in part on these databases, USDA makes the data available only to researchers through contractual cooperative agreements.
This was helped by the fact that for EPPSE, EPPNI and NESS policy agencies were the primary funders; nonetheless, researchers went beyond contractual obligations to create what can be described as 'co-production' between policy and research interests.
As much AHSS research remains unfunded there are also no contractual or funder obligations to which researchers must adhere which stipulate that research data must be open access or discoverable.
Research for the public good has been further constrained by property rights issues, and by denial of access to research material for researchers unwilling to sign contractual agreements with the developers, which confer unacceptable control over publication to the proprietary interests.
23 This may explain why industry is fairly highly cited across both guidelines as part of a researcher's more stringent contractual obligations.
This paper identifies the key empirical results from the multi-disciplinary literature to help transport researchers and practitioners place contractual decision-making in the broader theoretical context, suggesting aspects of transport contracting that merit future research.
However the basis of interactions relies on a complex blend of relational mechanisms with people working together, supported by contractual mechanisms such as project agreements, and researcher ethics committee approvals (Figure 1).
Contractual in nature, they serve to bind researchers and their institutions.
Large proprietary datasets have been made available to particular researchers because of the relationships or contractual agreements they have forged with the data-generating companies, which raises questions for reproducibility and review for the social science community [42].
