{"entity":{"id":"idea-data-open-licensed-guidelines","kind":"idea","name":"Open licences for publicly funded cancer guidelines","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","summary":"Guidelines such as NCCN's 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.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Knowledge reaches practice too slowly): Morris, Wooding & Grant, The answer is 17 years, what is the question (JRSM 2011)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2011.110180"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":["ai-computation"],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":["nccn","esmo"],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-knowledge-diffusion","b-global-access"],"keyPapers":["paper-morris-j-r-soc-med"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","test":"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","actor":"policy","cost":"small","horizonYears":2},"route":"/ideas/idea-data-open-licensed-guidelines/","neighbours":{"section":[{"id":"ai-computation","kind":"section","name":"AI & Computation","route":"/fronts/ai-computation/"}],"collection":[{"id":"nccn","kind":"collection","name":"NCCN Guidelines","route":"/collections/nccn/"}],"institution":[{"id":"esmo","kind":"institution","name":"European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)","route":"/institutions/esmo/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-knowledge-diffusion","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Knowledge reaches practice too slowly","route":"/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/"},{"id":"b-global-access","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Most of the world has almost no cancer care","route":"/bottlenecks/b-global-access/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-morris-j-r-soc-med","kind":"paper","name":"The answer is 17 years, what is the question: understanding time lags in translational research","route":"/key-papers/paper-morris-j-r-soc-med/"}]}}