AB 3033 (Laird) seeks to establish standard contract provisions between the University of California and the state. Currently, state agencies contract individually with departments or campuses within the UC system; in the 2004-5 fiscal year, 72 state agencies and departments entered into a total of 1,100 research contracts or contract amendments with the university. As CCST observed in its 2006 report Policy Frameowrk for Intellectual Property Derived from State-Funded Research, many of these contracts contain similar provisions and the large number of individual contracts represents a significant amount of redundancy in negotiation costs for both UC and the state.

This bill follows on the Federal Laboratory Contracting Act of 2006 (Speier), which addressed similar contracting issues between the state and the federal funded laboratories and was a direct response to a CCST report which brought the contracting issues to the Legislature's attention. AB 3033 would urge the regents, and require the Department of General Services, to establish standard contract provisions governing the conduct of research undertaken by the university for the state.

The UC Board of Regents and the Department of General Services would each retain the right, on a case-by-case basis, to initiate discussions over exceptions for unusual cases. However, the standard contract provisions would be intended to cover the majority of contracts between UC and the state.