Apply for a licence

OCTAL is licensed by the University of Oxford through Oxford University Innovation (OUI). We review every application individually and may not be able to take on every study.

Please read this before applying

OCTAL is not a commercial product. It is designed, developed and maintained by Dr Sijia Zhao under the supervision of Prof Masud Husain, in our own time, without dedicated funding from any organisation. The University of Oxford protects the platform's intellectual property. We make it freely available to academic collaborators by choice, and we are open to commercial use.

OCTAL is not a software download. Using the platform involves setup, training and ongoing support for analysis and interpretation. We also hold normative data from healthy participants across age groups, and comparable data from psychiatric and neurological conditions. Building and maintaining all of this takes time and resources, which is why an academic licence is essentially a research collaboration, usually with a Data Transfer Agreement between institutions.

Our motivation for sharing OCTAL is not to provide a service but to build something larger together: a growing dataset across diagnoses, age groups and cultures that helps us all understand the brain and cognition better.

Academic use

MiniOCTAL is free for non-commercial academic research. We help with task selection, advise on hypotheses around cognitive performance, set the study up, support it while it runs and handle the data processing.

The package includes

  • A study link of your own, hosted free of charge, in the languages you need.
  • Automated data analysis: raw and processed results for every participant, within minutes of each session.
  • Normative data: anonymised scores from healthy participants across the adult lifespan, for comparison.
  • A completion dashboard and a secure data repository for your team.
Apply for an academic licence

The application is a short OUI web form. Please talk to us first (step 1 below) so the form matches what we have agreed.

Commercial use

We are not offering commercial licences for MiniOCTAL at the moment: we do not have the capacity to support them.

If you are interested, you are welcome to register your interest with Dr Sijia Zhao at octal@psy.ox.ac.uk, with a short description of the intended use. After discussion we may be able to grant a commercial licence through Oxford University Innovation.

The steps

  1. Tell us about your study

    Email octal@psy.ox.ac.uk with a few lines on the population, the sample size, the setting (remote or in clinic) and the languages you need. We reply with whether OCTAL or MiniOCTAL fits and what we can offer.

  2. Apply through Oxford University Innovation

    Once we have agreed the study, submit the academic licence application. OUI issues the licence to the principal investigator.

  3. Data Transfer Agreement

    Where data will leave Oxford systems we usually need a Data Transfer Agreement between the two institutions. Your research office will have a template; we help with the OCTAL parts.

  4. Set-up and hand-over

    We build your study link, add your team to the data repository and send a guidebook written for your study. Then you can start recruiting.