The Consortium held a teleconference on 28th March 2008.

The Consortium finalized the agenda for the Academics Advisory meeting in April.

Chris Martin from Pfizer outlined the objectives of the Consortium, proposed guiding principles and an operating model and discussed various operating structures. (His slides can be found in the Knowledgebase)

The Consortium agreed that the most suitable structure was to engage a Consortium agent – i.e. use a third party agent to manage the project. The agent would hold the IP and co-ordinate vendors but provides “free” licence to contributors. TI Pharma was cited as an example.

To ensure the continuation of the Standards Working Group, various options were discussed including a subscription based SWG where subscribers pay a nominal fee to attend a set number of periodic meetings and access outputs produced as part of the SWG. This option and alternative options will be considered further.

EU funding through ACIES (Leading specialist in the Management and Financing of European Research Projects and Networks) or David Koubi (previously employeed at ACIES) on a ‘No Win No Fee’ basis was considered. These options will be investigated further.