# Promote academics for trials completed, data shared and findings replicated

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-academic-promotion-reform/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-academic-promotion-reform` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Universities and cancer centres would change how they promote scientists, giving credit for finishing trials, sharing data, replicating others' work and publishing failures, not just for papers in famous journals.

## Summary

Cancer centres and medical schools adopt narrative CVs and explicit promotion criteria that credit trial completion and reporting, data and code deposition, registered reports, replication studies, tool and model contributions and patient-facing outputs, while discounting journal impact factor (per the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment). Funders reinforce this by requiring the same formats in applications. The current system rewards novel positive findings in high-impact journals, which is precisely the incentive structure that produces irreproducible preclinical cancer biology and unpublished trials.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Centres that adopt the reformed criteria show, within five years, higher rates of trial result reporting, data deposition and replication publications by their faculty than matched centres, with no decline in external grant success.
- Rationale: DORA has been signed by thousands of institutions and Utrecht University and others have removed impact factor from promotion; early evidence suggests changes in researcher behaviour where criteria are concrete. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology attributes irreproducibility partly to incentives for novelty.
- Proposed test: A consortium of ten cancer centres adopts the criteria; pre-register the comparison of reporting, sharing and replication metrics with ten matched centres over five years.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: research

## Sources

- San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: https://sfdora.org/

## Connected records

- collections: [NCI-Designated Cancer Centers](https://onco.cc/collections/nci-cancer-centers/)
- ideas: [A universal material transfer agreement with a thirty-day default](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-universal-mta-fast-lane/), [Funder bonuses for releasing results and data within six months, negatives included](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-open-results-bonus/), [Pay investigators for finishing and publishing trials, not for enrolling patients](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-trial-completion-bonus/), [Scoop protection and co-publication norms to reduce academic secrecy](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-scoop-protection-policy/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-incentive-misalignment/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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