Lawyers representing the purported owner of the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (both MMAS-4 and MMAS-8), and one of its authors, Dr. Donald Morisky, have threatened universities and researchers (including here at Penn) with copyright infringement and breach of contract lawsuits, and pushed for retraction of publications, when a researcher has used either MMAS-4 or MMAS-8 as part of academic research. The University of Pennsylvania Office of the General Counsel’s current advice is not to sign any license, permission, or other document that MMAS Research, LLC, Dr. Morisky, or his associate Mr. Steven Trubow, might send to you in connection with the MMAS-4 or MMAS-8, and forward the document through the Research Inventory System to either the University’s Office of Research Services (if your work is state- or federally- funded) or the Penn Center for Innovation (if your work is otherwise funded). 

If you are contacted directly by Dr. Morisky, Mr. Trubow, or one of their lawyers asserting that you may have violated a law or contract, please contact Robert Firestone in OGC or Katherine (“Kat”) Fibiger at PCI. OGC also urges you to consider using (or, if protected by copyright, requesting permission to use) a publicly-available alternative to the MMAS-4 or MMAS-8 as part of any research involving medication adherence. For example, researchers at peer universities are now using NIH-funded Self-Reported Medication Nonadherence measurement tools created by Corrine Voils, PhD, available here, as alternatives to MMAS-4 or MMAS-8: https://www.surgery.wisc.edu/research/researchers-labs/corrine-voils-phd/self-reported-medication-nonadherence-measurement/.

You may also want to consider using, or requesting permission to use, one or more of the following, instead of the MMAS-4 and MMAS-8: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4656225/table/Tab2/?report=objectonly