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Legal Questions for Atlas

#1

Hi,
We are trying to install atlas on our site, but our legal department wants to clarify some questions related to the software. Who should we contact for the legal questions?

Thanks!

#2

@Michael:

ATLAS, like almost all OHDSI artifacts is created by an army of volunteers and licensed under APL, which means Public Domain with no restrictions free of charge. As an Open Source community, we don’t have a legal department to contact. If you are a commercial entity you may want to connect to one of the folks who provide commercial maintenance and support contracts, such as @gregk.

#3

Thank you!

#4

Hello all,

I think my question is answered through this thread but just to make sure.

I work for an SME which works on OMOPing projects for clinics / hospitals.
As a next step we explore how we will give access to researchers or pharma users through paid licenses. Is it ok if we offer Atlas UI under paid licenses?

Thanks in advance!

#5

@thanos_vidakis:

Altas is distributed under APL. That’s it. But you can tweak the code, make it your own product and sell it under your own license. Theoretically, you could get there with a minimal change (e.g. calling it Otlos or Ατλασ). However, the customers will probably not like it and will point out to you that Atlas is Open Source and should therefore be free.

Good luck.

#6

Thanks a lot for the clear answer @Christian_Reich !
(It’s not that we want to sell Atlas here, the high-level question is how we can grow the ohdsi/omop community, what are the different ways to get funds to convince clinics/hospitals to join the network + make sure that the companies that deploy OHDSI tools or do the mapping to OMOP will be funded as well. Is there any open discussion or a place where we openly discuss those topics in the forum? Thanks again!)

#7

That is a very good question: What is the business model for an institution to go OHDSI. There is no generic or predefined answer. Folks have various ways to make it work:

  • Academic clinical research (PhD, publishing papers)
  • Academic grant writing.
  • Academic teaching.
  • Commercial clinical research (selling studies).
  • Data aggregation and network building, and possibly selling.
  • Specialty data capture, registries and surveys, and possibly selling that.
  • Method development, tool development, AI application, possibly selling them.
  • Becoming a SME, possibly selling services
  • Community work and contribution
  • Internal improvement of processes and quality and benchmarking

Am I missing something?

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