{"entity":{"id":"idea-tr2-writeup-grants","kind":"idea","name":"Small grants that pay scientists to write up abandoned projects","aka":[],"tldr":"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 Paying for a few months of writing would recover years of otherwise lost work.","summary":"Every lab has unpublished null results from completed projects: a hypothesis tested carefully that did not hold.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.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Failures are hidden): Anderson et al., Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov (NEJM 2015)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1409364"}],"tags":[],"related":["idea-tr2-negative-results-journal","idea-tr2-preclinical-negative-registry"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-negative-results","b-funding-allocation"],"keyPapers":["paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","test":"Pilot with 50 grants; measure completion rate, time to deposit and downstream views or citations.","maturity":"speculative","actor":"philanthropy","cost":"small","horizonYears":1},"route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-writeup-grants/","neighbours":{"idea":[{"id":"idea-tr2-negative-results-journal","kind":"idea","name":"A funder-backed, indexed journal of negative and inconclusive cancer results","route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-negative-results-journal/"},{"id":"idea-tr2-preclinical-negative-registry","kind":"idea","name":"A registry for preclinical experiments that did not work","route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-preclinical-negative-registry/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-negative-results","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Failures are hidden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/"},{"id":"b-funding-allocation","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Funding follows fashion, not burden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med","kind":"paper","name":"Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov","route":"/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/"}]}}