# Small grants that pay scientists to write up abandoned projects

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

## TL;DR

Failed projects are not published because nobody has the time. Paying for a few months of writing would recover years of otherwise lost work.

## Summary

Every lab has unpublished null results from completed projects: a hypothesis tested carefully that did not hold. The cost of writing them up is a few months of a postdoc's time with no career reward. A funder programme offering short 'completion grants' conditional on deposit in a negative-results venue would recover this work at very low cost per result.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A programme of 200 completion grants per year produces at least 150 published or deposited null results per year, at a cost per result under one tenth of a typical project grant.
- Rationale: Surveys suggest a substantial share of completed studies are never published, most often because the result was null. The barrier is effort, not data.
- Proposed test: Pilot with 50 grants; measure completion rate, time to deposit and downstream views or citations.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Failures are hidden): Anderson et al., Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov (NEJM 2015): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1409364

## Connected records

- ideas: [A funder-backed, indexed journal of negative and inconclusive cancer results](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-negative-results-journal/), [A registry for preclinical experiments that did not work](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-preclinical-negative-registry/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/)
- key papers: [Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/)

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