Microsoft Corp.’s legal team took another step toward increasing cross-industry collaboration Tuesday, releasing data sharing agreement templates to make the process less burdensome.

Lack of a standardized agreement process is one of the “barriers to sharing data” preventing researchers from accessing the wide pool of data they need to build new artificial intelligence tools, a Microsoft representative said Tuesday. Erich Andersen, the Redmond, Washington-based tech company’s chief intellectual property counsel, said in an email that it’s taken some organizations up to a year to negotiate data sharing agreements.