# Open licences for publicly funded cancer guidelines

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-open-licensed-guidelines/  
OnCo record `idea-data-open-licensed-guidelines` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Guidelines paid for with public or charitable money would be published under an open licence so any hospital system, app or country can build them in without permission or fees.

## Summary

Guidelines such as NCCN's are copyrighted and licensed commercially, which blocks their embedding in software and their adaptation in low-resource settings. The proposal makes open licensing (CC-BY or similar) a condition of public and charitable funding for guideline development, with a transition fund for bodies that depend on licence income. WHO and some national bodies already publish openly; NCCN and others do not.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Openly licensed guidelines will be embedded in at least twice as many decision-support and patient-facing products, and adapted in more countries, than comparable restricted guidelines within three years.
- Rationale: Open licensing drove the reuse of drug information (e.g., open formularies) and of software; the marginal cost of guideline reuse is near zero, so licensing is the only barrier.
- Proposed test: Compare downstream reuse (software integrations, adaptations, translations) of open versus restricted guidelines of similar quality over three years; pilot a transition fund with one guideline body.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Knowledge reaches practice too slowly): Morris, Wooding & Grant, The answer is 17 years, what is the question (JRSM 2011): https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2011.110180

## Connected records

- fronts: [AI & Computation](https://onco.cc/fronts/ai-computation/)
- collections: [NCCN Guidelines](https://onco.cc/collections/nccn/)
- institutions: [European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)](https://onco.cc/institutions/esmo/)
- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Most of the world has almost no cancer care](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-global-access/)
- key papers: [The answer is 17 years, what is the question: understanding time lags in translational research](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-morris-j-r-soc-med/)

---
JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/idea-data-open-licensed-guidelines.json