International Agreements

Should be negotiated and reported in the Penn ERA (Electronic Research Administration) system or RIS (Research Inventory System).

The University’s Office of Gift Management is responsible for oversight, management, and compliance of (1) deferred giving vehicles, including the administration of all aspects of estate/bequest settlement, trust, and life income gifts, (2) Penn’s gift agreement process for all commitments of $25,000 or more, and (3) the Penn Donor Advised Fund and gifted life insurance policies.

International procurement contracts should be maintained within your School. Please review the Agreement Development FAQ for more information. 

Penn institution-to-foreign-institution non-monetary agreements not included in one of the systems mentioned above should be maintained by GSS.

Any School-based agreement should first be reviewed and approved by the School at the Dean-level. Once approved by the Dean, Amy Gadsden or Artemis Koch in the Office of the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives/Penn Global can facilitate central review before signing. The Office of Global Support Services can also provide template agreements which contain approved language that may be used in developing your agreement. A point of contact (either faculty or staff) should be designated in the agreement. Both Dr. Gadsden and Artemis Koch are happy to advise schools that are considering entering into agreements with overseas partner schools.

Penn Global will share the document with other appropriate offices for further review. Undergraduate study abroad agreements will be reviewed by Penn Abroad. Any agreement with a request for a signature from the President or Provost will be reviewed by the Office of the Provost.

All agreements need to include language approved by the Office of General Counsel (OGC), which may take the form of a pre-approved University or School template. If an appropriate template does not exist, or the agreement must differ substantively from the template, OGC will also need to review the language before the agreement is signed.

Once the review is complete, you will be contacted to confirm that the agreement is ready for signature or to make changes. If major changes are requested, we will ask that the updated document be returned for review prior to signature.

For School-based agreements, the Dean signs the agreement. If the agreement includes more than one Penn School, the Deans from all of the participating Schools should sign it.

Please send a copy of the executed agreement to Penn Global. Either Amy or Artemis will accept responsibility for maintaining the Provost copy of all agreements. You can provide a copy directly to GSS by emailing globalsupport@pobox.upenn.edu.

We recommend that you have separate agreements for each activity, so that the language is appropriate for each activity and the different parts of the partnership could conclude at different times.

All agreements should have a firm end date (not more than five years) from the date of signature, to allow for appropriate reviews to occur at least every five years.

For agreements that are straightforward and follow standard templates, the process should take no more than ten working days. For more complex agreements that involve multiple offices, the process may take three to four weeks.

Renewals follow the same process described above.