OnCo
ideasIdea

Open licences for publicly funded cancer guidelines

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.

Many guidelines 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.

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.
What would test it
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
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

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