Employees of the University have an obligation to disclose their inventions in writing to the Office of Technology Licensing. The IPIRA website provides links for disclosing your invention or copyrightable work as well as information about the process for disclosing an invention, tangible material, copyrightable software, multimedia (including software), or technical data.
Due to restrictions on patenting, if a disclosure is made to the OTL after it has been publicly disseminated in an enabling way, (such as fully described in a seminar or a printed publication), then patent rights outside of the United States are generally not available. Therefore early disclosure is recommended. The optimal time to disclose is after the invention has been conceived and initial data are available, but before it has been publicly divulged.