Originally Posted by dr wadd

One of the strange things about Doctor Who is that for at least a very long period of time (and perhaps the entire run, I`m not sure) the creators of any creatures or enemies actually retained all rights to those creations, irrespective of whether they were an established writer or not.

It would be very easy to do a spin-off with any of the creatures without featuring any of the established Who continuity. There would be plenty of scope to do Cybermen stories with a different protagonist.