Chunk #21 — Building and Supporting the REDCap Consortium: A Phased Approach — Phase 4: Creating a Broader National Presence (~ 50 sites; ~ 2008–2009) — Challenges:
The no-cost licensing agreement required vetting by approximately 50 sites before finalization, but ultimately became the single accepted End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) for REDCap. Vanderbilt declined any individual REDCap EULA negotiations, as the maintenance of a growing number of divergent agreements would place an excessive burden on Vanderbilt’s technology transfer office. Increasing the number of Consortium partners also increased the amount of support required to run the Consortium, hampering the effectiveness of the small Vanderbilt REDCap team. Although the Vanderbilt team could provide only a small amount of Consortium support, appeals to our Consortium members to help answer questions via the listserv without prompting helped cultivate a distributed support mechanism where Consortium partners supported each other. Requests for non-technical support from interested potential partners became overbearing (e.g., “we are considering REDCap, but our IT team needs you to complete a 20-page vendor questionnaire”), and we eventually had to create a policy denying most requests due to time constraints. More installations of the REDCap software at top-tier medical centers brought additional security scrutiny, forcing our technical team to develop standard
