Issue link: https://htpgraphics.uberflip.com/i/392125
Any research programme must have a clear Research Plan at the heart of it, which all participants commit to willingly. All other terms of the arrangement will flow from it, in particular those relating to the management of the Research Project. It is recognised that, as in proposals sent to Research Councils, some studies can be comparatively open-ended, and lack of detail can often be useful in shaping deliverables. However the opposite is true with applied research. Ideally the Research Plan should be fully developed before the Research Contract is signed up. Sometimes this may not be feasible if there needs to be some collaboration to scope the research. In this case your contract may have to provide that one participant prepares a draft and submits it to the others for review and discussion. The contract can build in a system of iterations for this process for a set time until the Research Plan is either agreed and signed off or until a participant serves notice to terminate the arrangements. If the arrangements are terminated then no participant would have any further liability to any of the others, except usually in relation to confidentiality. As the Research Plan will almost certainly have been written by somebody different from the person who has written the main legal text it is important that these documents are both looked at carefully to make sure that they do not contradict each other. It is also important that terms which are specifically defined in the main legal text are the same as those used in the Research Plan. If they are not you may find that your contract, as a whole, is ambiguous and that is when disputes can arise. Research Plan Section 4 19