Suggested internal effort: 2–4 person-days across commercial, product and finance; assumption only. Appoint one commercial sponsor and identify who may approve spending, disclosure and rights. Do not make a junior researcher responsible for accepting an indemnity or granting access.
Write the decision in operational language: “Determine whether to offer the cleared 2018–2025 engineering article cohort for a limited retrieval pilot, and whether to appoint a representative for that route.” Replace broad ambitions such as “monetise all our data”.
The brief should contain the candidate archive, customer problem, permitted-use hypothesis, excluded assets, current products potentially affected, decision date, initial spending cap and acceptable outcomes. Include an explicit no-deal outcome so sunk effort does not become the reason to proceed.
Who to contact: the licensing director, archive owner, product manager, general counsel and finance lead. Ask product colleagues which existing subscriptions or feeds the proposed use might replace. Have the sponsor identify what evidence would change the decision.
Completion condition: the sponsor signs the brief and the team can distinguish an enquiry, a pilot and a production licence. If nobody owns the decision or can fund the first evidence-gathering phase, pause before soliciting expensive preparation proposals.