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This page explains the intellectual property and publication terms in the SPAR Mentor Agreement and SPAR Mentee Agreement. Last updated September 9, 2026. The agreements govern if anything here differs.

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The defaults

Unless your project sets its own terms, the agreements every participant signs provide:

• Each person owns the intellectual property in their own contributions. Jointly created work is governed by copyright law.
• Everyone on the team grants everyone else a perpetual, royalty-free license to use their contributions for research, for continuing the project, and for publication.
• Publicly releasing project findings needs a mentor's consent. Mentees ask their mentor, and mentors agree not to withhold it unreasonably or for long. Concerns about the readiness of results or their scientific integrity are reasonable grounds to say no. For a Sensitive Project (see the Responsible Research Policy), consent is at the mentor's sole discretion.
• Anyone may always describe their own participation and contributions (in a CV, an application, a portfolio, at Demo Day), short of disclosing findings that are still under wraps.
• Authorship follows the norms of your field. The agreements neither grant nor remove it.
• Kairos gets a license to identify the project and its outputs (papers, posts, code, datasets, models, presentations), publish mentor profiles on sparai.org, host outputs in the SPAR research library, use Demo Day materials, and report to funders. Anyone can opt out of the research library and marketing use by emailing [email protected]. Kairos takes no other rights in the work.

Project-specific terms (Project IP Terms)

Mentors can replace the ownership and publishing defaults with written terms specific to the project, for example the terms an employer or a backing organization requires. When they bind mentees depends on timing:

• Shared before or when a mentee joins the project (in the welcome email, for instance): they bind on joining.
• Shared within 14 days after the round's start date: they bind 7 days after they're shared, apply only to work from then on, and during those 7 days a mentee may withdraw from the project without penalty.
• After that: new or changed terms bind a mentee only if that mentee agrees.

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For mentors. Send Kairos a copy when you adopt terms ([email protected]), and do it before spending from a Kairos budget. We can object within 7 days on two narrow grounds only, that the terms would make our funding inconsistent with our charitable purpose or legal obligations, or that they impose obligations on mentees that are unreasonable for a volunteer research program (such as restricting their work beyond the project). Not objecting is not an endorsement, and Kairos is not a party to your terms. Your terms can't remove Kairos's license above. If your project is backed by your employer or another organization, tell us (the proposal form has a checkbox). Kairos won't fund a project in which a backing organization holds exclusive commercial rights in Kairos-funded outputs unless we've seen those terms and not objected.

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For mentees. If your mentor shares terms, read them. Ask your mentor what they change, and ask us ([email protected]) if anything is unclear. Terms shared within 14 days of the round's start take effect a week later, and in that week you can leave the project with no mark against you. They never change who owns what you've already contributed.

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Talk about it in your first team meeting

Kairos doesn't mediate IP. Please settle these early, in writing, and revisit if the project changes:

• Ownership: the defaults, joint ownership of the paper and code, an open license, or an organization's terms.
• Where code and data live, and under what license.