The intellectual property management for data sharing in a German liver cancer research network.

Sharing data in biomedical research networks has great potential benefits including efficient use of resources, avoiding duplicate experiments and promoting collaboration. However, concerns from data producers about difficulties of getting proper acknowledgement for their contributions are becoming obstacles for efficient and network wide data sharing in reality. Effective and convenient ways of intellectual property management and acknowledging contributions to the data producers are required. This paper analyzed the system requirements for intellectual property management in a German liver cancer research network and proposed solutions for facilitating acknowledgement of data contributors using informatics tools instead of pure policy level strategies.