Promote academics for trials completed, data shared and findings replicated
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.
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journals, which is precisely the incentive structure that produces irreproducible preclinical cancer biology and unpublished trials.
- Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains · The system pays the same for a drug that adds two months as for a cure, so companies race to copy rather than to cure.
- Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.
- Failures are hidden · Negative trials, failed drugs and abandoned programmes are rarely published, so the same mistakes are repeated.