WHEN: Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 09:00-10:15

LOCATION: Room Agora

Organizers

  • Muriah Wheelock, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States
  • Stefano Moia, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands

Description

This symposium aims to engage the audience in reflecting on the impact of legal requirements, including privacy laws, licences, and patents on reproducible science in both academic and industry, from software development to data sharing to manuscript publication. Although licensing and patenting are often overlooked in scientific education, their influence on software, data, and manuscript distribution is far reaching and impacts everyone in the OHBM community.

Rather than focusing on how licenses should be used or laws interpreted, this symposium will tackle current issues from the perspective of their impact on scientific outputs. Speakers will dedicate time during each talk to introduce concepts like copyright, patents, and regulatory bodies and discuss their broader implications while also introducing specific use cases spanning academic, governmental, and industry perspectives. By addressing these topics in a symposium format, we facilitate a comprehensive, multidisciplinary dialogue incorporating expertise in law, governmental policy, and industry.

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe how both for-profit and copy-left licenses can restrict open science.
  2. Employ a plan of action when government-funded research publishing licences conflict with the licenses of publishers.
  3. Express the reasons MRI data may fall under strict legal regulations and how this impacts data sharing globally.

Target Audience

The target audience is researchers of any stage interested in better understanding licensing and how licensing choices can impact open and reproducible science. While specific use cases are elaborated on, including MRI pulse sequences, neuroimaging software, NIH publishing licenses, and GDPR regulations on data sharing, the concepts discussed in this symposium are broadly applicable for any OHBM attendant who has used neuroimaging tools, data, or published in journals.

Presentations

Presenter: Katie Funk

Affiliation: Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, United States

Copyright and licenses provide legal frameworks that protect the intellectual property and impact the distribution of scientific products. As the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, the National Institute of Health (NIH) has proprietary interest in the licensing and distribution of scientific products generated by NIH awards. In December 2024, the NIH announced an updated public access policy, requiring that manuscripts accepted for publication in journals be made publicly available in PubMed Central immediately upon publication. Guidance on publishing costs and the rights Federal agencies hold under the “Government Use License” (or “Federal Purpose License”) was also released with the 2024 Policy.

Since taking effect on July 1, 2025, the updated policy, and accompanying materials, have reopened debate around author rights and publisher policies in facilitating the immediate sharing of accepted author manuscripts. The policy change has also prompted NIH to raise questions about the use of federal funds to cover the article processing charges (APCs) that many journals require for open access licensing. This presentation will provide context for the shift to immediate public access for federally funded research, explain the practical implications of Government Use License and related licensing considerations, and provide guidance to researchers for navigating journal licences and APCs.

Open science in medical technology: mindful approach to licenses, patents, and intellectual property

Presenter: Maxim Zaitsev

Affiliation: University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

A distinctive feature of MRI is that much of its technology has been co-created over the past four decades through close collaboration between academia and industry. In this model, vendors developed medical imaging devices, provided closed-source method development environments to selected research sites, and shared limited portions of source code under the terms of specific collaboration agreements. While this approach fostered collaboration, it also led to a fragmented and partially opaque research landscape that increasingly faces challenges related to replication and reproducibility.

To address limitations in data and methodology sharing, we create PulSeq, a vendor-neutral MR pulse sequence framework that can serve as a foundation for a fully open-source MRI ecosystem, to promote the sharing of pulse sequence and image reconstruction code. Establishing such an environment can foster collaboration between researchers, improve reproducibility, mitigate artificial vendor boundaries, and enhance research impact, but it also requires a responsible approach to intellectual property rights, which depends on mutual understanding and respect between the research community and industry. In this talk we will share our experience and lessons learnt from the PulSeq project, showing that alongside growing enthusiasm for openness, increased literacy in intellectual property rights and obligations is equally important.

Business Context Preferences of Open vs. Closed Software and Technique

Presenter: Prantik Kundu

Affiliation: Wayne State University / Eye Three Inc., Detroit, MI, United States

The past 20 years have shown the world that open-source software is transformative for rapid advancement and growth in many areas of science and technology, and its role in commercial software has been particularly surprising given several prior decades of closed-source precedent. However, in many current and longstanding private and commercial contexts, open approaches create several lines of financial and legal risk to equity holders and customers, especially when ownership and responsibility are tied to risks of health and life. The reality for medical scientists working in data and informatics traversing commercial applications is that both contexts are real and valid and must coexist. In this talk we will discuss strategies including using specific software development patterns, intellectual property, licensing, and ecosystem building that allow for productive synergies between open and closed source software.

Presenter: Mireille Sant

Affiliation: University of Malta, Malta, NA, Malta

This lecture outlines how the European Union (EU) data protection law currently applies to neuroimaging data sharing, explaining why MRI datasets almost always constitute personal and often special category data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), thereby triggering strict legal bases, derogations, core data protection principles, information obligations, and international transfer constraints, affecting smaller institutions disproportionately.

It then assesses the impact on sustainable, inclusive, and reproducible science of the proposed EU reforms, including a clarified definition of scientific research, revised compatibility rules for further processing, entity-relative identifiability standards, and streamlined information duties, that could reshape compliance pathways and either alleviate or entrench the existing patchwork of Member State obligations. Finally, the lecture abstracts these insights to consider how the GDPR’s concepts, constraints, and regulatory logic influence global data sharing ecosystems, highlighting implications for researchers and data users outside the EU and drawing parallels with other international frameworks to identify common challenges and opportunities for open, equitable neuroimaging science.