Licensing and Permission Section

Health Assessment Lab, the Medical Outcomes Trust, and QualityMetric Incorporated, co-copyright and trademark holders of the SF-36^®, SF-12^® and SF-8™ Health Surveys, merged their user registration and licensing programs in 2002. The combined licensing program for the SF Generic Health Surveys has two objectives:

• To simplify the licensing and user registration process.
• To better meet the needs of the many academic, commercial, and other users of the SF forms for questionnaires, scoring algorithms, user manuals, and norms.

Our overall goals for these programs remain unchanged:

• We strive to maintain the scientific standards for our surveys and scoring algorithms that make results directly comparable and interpretable.
• We remain committed to making our surveys available royalty-free to individuals and organizations for use in non-funded scholarly research.

Because of the expanded worldwide demand for commercial products and services that use the SF surveys, we have expanded our licensing programs for re-sellers and for commercially sponsored research that use our trademarks, copyrighted forms, scoring algorithms, norms, and other interpretation guidelines in the United States and in more than 40 other countries. The licensing program will assure that those individuals and organizations that benefit from commercial use of this intellectual property will pay royalties or other user fees that will support the research community that developed the surveys. It also will make it possible to offer the SF surveys to non-funded academic users worldwide at minimal cost.

For more information about the user registration and licensing programs, including a list of translations that are currently available, please go to User Registration and Licensing.