Operating a college or university is an expensive undertaking that requires tremendous funding. With a troubled economy, grants and gifts to colleges and universities have dropped 12% - the biggest dip in the last 40 years. This has been mitigated somewhat by an influx of research dollars from the 2009 stimulus package, but amid pressure to back down from planned tuition increases, the net result may still be detrimental to universities' bottom lines.

As a potential source of additional funding, commercializing the inventions of faculty researchers continues to gain momentum. Institutions are increasingly driven by the "home run" licensing deals with promises of big revenue earning power. However, they often assume they have overriding ownership rights in faculty intellectual property, but this is not as accurate as they'd like their faculty to believe.

When federal funding is involved, the university typically can legitimately request assignment of the innovation from the faculty member. When corporate funding sponsors the research, the company takes ownership precedence. If the research is directed without private or public funding, the faculty member should retain the rights to own and direct the future of their innovation.

Unfortunately, this is not the case most of the time. Instead, many university policies overstep what seems intuitive and assert ownership where it is not due. Faculty salaries are commensurate with their core job function - teaching. Research or development of IP may be an encouraged practice of academic employment, but is handled inconsistently based on area of employment and contract agreements.

If an English professor writes a book, their university doesn't force assignment of that IP to the school and demand a large percentage of the profit generated by its sale. So, why then do many universities feel at ease assuming ownership of the IP of scientists and engineers in their employment?

The starting point for abridging the ownership rights of faculty is the IP policy. These policies are drafted by the university and typically contain the clause, in some form or another, that policies will be updated "from time to time". Whether universities alert faculty of these changes or give them an opportunity to participate varies from school to school and depends, in large part, on the discretion of the school.

University IP policies range from the reasonable to those that run rampant. Often universities claim ownership of all the results of faculty research performed in their facilities, with no regard for the source of funding or whether university resources were used at all in its creation. The worst of these policies adopt a broad, overreaching approach of taking it all. The better policies specify control based on funding source, use of university facilities and resources, or whether the research was assigned by the institution.

An employment agreement is the second component to controlling and directing the research of faculty. There are, as with IP policies, good and bad contractual terms. The worst agreements require its faculty to sign away all their rights to future research as a condition of their employment. Again, a 'taking-it-all' approach.

There are two methods commonly used for phrasing this approach; "I hereby assign" or "I agree to assign". Both relate to future inventions, but the former is an assignment in advance, while the latter is an agreement to assign at some future date after the invention is made. This may seem like meaningless semantics, but a recent ruling in the Stanford v. Roche case, the latter was exercised and cost Stanford the ownership share of one of its inventors.

The third tool to controlling faculty IP is the invention disclosure form. Many universities include a clause in this form which assigns the invention being disclosed as a condition of disclosure. This presents a 'Catch 22' for faculty whose innovation was not made with public or private funds. To be in compliance with IP policy and employer agreements, invention disclosure is mandated. Yet by the very act of disclosing the invention the faculty member is coerced into assigning ownership rights to the university that it may well not be entitled to.

Such was the case with Professor Galen Suppes of the University of Missouri. He knew the university wasn't entitled to his innovation, so he modified the invention disclosure form so that he could comply with university IP policy requiring disclosure, but wasn't signing away the rights to his work. And what was the result for trying to extricate himself from this 'Catch-22'? The university hit him with a lawsuit.

At the end of the day, if faculty researchers could afford to wage a legal battle against their university, many of these carefully worded agreements might not hold up in court. These would typically be considered contracts of adhesion - not illegal - but so one-sided that they could be deemed unconscionable, and thus unenforceable.

For faculty already employed under such an agreement, it may be too late to rewrite history, but if retaining ownerships rights in research is important to them, exploring their employment opportunities with a more reasonable university may be the only way out from under this onerous condition of employment.

Understanding the IP policy, employment agreement and invention disclosure policies prior to employment is the best route for research faculty who want to remain in control of the future of their work. Better yet, a call for universities to standardize IP policies and documents relating to ownership of IP is a worthwhile consideration. Let the universities take no more than they are entitled to by law and allow their faculty to research free of coercion and fear of appropriation of their innovations.