# Bounties for documented failed replications of high-impact findings

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-bounties/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-replication-bounties` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Pay a fixed reward to any lab that pre-registers and carefully repeats a heavily cited preclinical cancer finding, whatever the outcome, with a bonus for the first documented non-replication that passes methodological review. Today that work is unpaid and unpublished.

## Summary

Security research uses bug bounties to reward finding flaws. A replication bounty programme would list high-impact preclinical oncology findings (selected by citations and translational stage), pay a fixed sum for a pre-registered, adequately powered replication attempt regardless of outcome, and a bonus for the first documented non-replication that passes methodological review. Results are published in a registry.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: The programme will produce at least 50 pre-registered replications per year at a cost per replication under a tenth of a standard grant, and at least a third of targeted findings will fail to replicate.
- Rationale: Replication attempts already happen informally in labs and industry; the bounty converts private knowledge into public record at low cost.
- Proposed test: Fund 50 bounties in year one; measure uptake, methodological quality of submissions and publication of results.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Preclinical results do not reproduce): Errington et al., Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology (eLife 2021): https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601

## Connected records

- ideas: [A registry for preclinical experiments that did not work](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-preclinical-negative-registry/), [A replication status badge on every cancer paper, visible in PubMed](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-status-badge/), [Funders set aside a fixed share of budget for independent replication](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-set-aside/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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