Licensing

We actively pursue partnerships with organizations and governments that wish to adopt our tools. Use is permitted only by written license with interRAI; the purchase of a User’s manual does not provide a use license. Non commercial users (e.g., governments, care providers, or researchers) can be granted a royalty-free license. Licensing by commercial users (including software vendors) usually requires royalty payments for use of our intellectual property. Revenues are used solely for research purposes.

As a nonprofit corporation under the US Tax Code, interRAI holds the copyright to our assessment systems, including those for long-term care facilities (MDS Version 2.0 and 3.0 are in the public domain only within the United States), home care, palliative care, mental health (outside of Canada), intellectual disability, acute care, child and youth, and quality of life, among others.

The scales, algorithms, and case-mix measures based on these assessment instruments are not copyrighted and are thus available to everyone, although the individual items on which they are based are copyrighted.

The major clauses of our royalty-free licenses include:

• the instrument is not to be changed substantially (except individual identifiers and demographics), although additional items can be added;
• only licensed translations can be used;
• the instrument will not be incorporated into products to be sold to or paid for by others;
• the organization will make appropriate efforts to inform others of the copyright status of the instrument;
• interRAI’s logo and copyright notice are to appear on the form and any other publication;
• authors, author institutions, and translators (as appropriate) are to be acknowledged in any document where authors would usually be listed;
• electronic data from use of the instrument are to be shared with interRAI, subject to existing laws on confidentiality and data use.

Commercial use usually requires royalties. Licenses usually pertain to individual instruments and nations. In this instance, interRAI may omit the data-sharing requirement, but retains the other requirements for a logo, attribution, etc. Software vendors are usually required to:

• develop methods to sublicense the interRAI instruments to users;
• imbed export routines in their software to enable data-sharing, including with interRAI;
• implement user reports for scales and other algorithms;
• avoid mounting interRAI licensed products on the open web.
• We will be pleased in any license negotiations to acknowledge the participation of individuals or organizations that have played a substantial role in getting the instrument to the point of implementation.

For more information on licensing, please contact: contracts@interRAI.org