About This Project

Open Source is Tech Transfer

A working group of technology transfer offices and open source programs offices making the case that open source software is a legitimate — and often optimal — mechanism for translating university research.

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The Project

Why This Work Matters

University technology transfer offices (TTOs) were created to translate research into public benefit. For decades, that has meant patents and proprietary licensing — an approach formalized by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. But as software has become the infrastructure of modern scientific research, a gap has grown: open source software, the dominant mode of computational discovery, has largely been left outside the TTO mission.

Open source is not the absence of technology transfer — it is technology transfer by another means. When a university releases software under an open source license, it is granting a license to copyrights and often patent rights to the public. TTOs are the organizations designated to license IP at universities. They should also be responsible for open source licenses.

"One would be hard-pressed to find any piece of scientific literature published today that has not been supported in some way by at least a dozen if not more open source software projects."

This site is a resource for the technology transfer community — practitioners, researchers, administrators, and policymakers — who want to understand how open source fits within the TTO mission and how to build organizational capacity to support it.

The Authors

Who We Are

Andrew Wichmann
Johns Hopkins University

Andrew Wichmann works at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures and has been a convener of the OSiTT working group since its founding. His work focuses on the intersection of open source software, intellectual property, and technology transfer policy.

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Megan Forbes
Johns Hopkins University

Megan Forbes is a co-author of the OSiTT framework and brings expertise in open source community strategy and sustainability, including co-authorship of It Takes a Village: Open Source Software Sustainability.

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Ashwathi Iyer
University of Michigan

Ashwathi Iyer is a co-author based at the University of Michigan's Innovation Partnerships office, which operates the Michigan Open Source Software (MOSS) program — one of the leading university open source programs in the United States.

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The Community

The OSiTT Working Group

This work was developed through monthly discussions throughout 2025 with a working group of 32 TTOs, open source programs offices, and related organizations across the United States and abroad. The group's goal is to build shared vocabulary, metrics, and frameworks for open source technology transfer — and to advocate for its formal inclusion in the TTO mission.

Arizona University of Chicago Carnegie Mellon CURIOSS George Washington University University of Illinois Johns Hopkins University JHU Applied Physics Lab LSU Mass General Brigham University of Michigan MIT NYU Langone Oregon State RIT Stanford Trinity College Dublin UAB UC Davis UC Santa Cruz UC San Diego University of Minnesota UNC UT Austin UT Southwestern UTEP University of Vermont University of Washington Vrije Universiteit Brussel Yale

Read the Position Paper

"Standardizing Open Source Impact Metrics: A Framework for Academic Technology Transfer Offices" — Forbes, Iyer, and Wichmann, 2026.

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