What Is Expert Curation?
Expert Curation is Trellis: Cancer's system for ensuring scientific integrity, expert guidance, and community-driven insight across the disease knowledge and research landscape. It is not a popularity vote — it is a bounded peer-attestation system where qualified professionals provide formal endorsements of research areas, constraints, and curated interpretations of evidence.
This approach acknowledges that experts can disagree in good faith, that progress requires diverse perspectives, and that instead of a single authoritative voice, we need a living, responsive, expert-verified knowledge ecosystem to drive forward meaningful advances.
Core Principles
- Bounded Authority: Attestors provide endorsements, not unilateral control
- Diversity of Expertise: Attestations span clinical, translational, epidemiological, and patient-centered domains
- Temporal Renewal: Endorsements expire or are reviewed periodically to reflect evolving science
- Consensus-Driven Progress: Priority rises when multiple experts independently attest
- Hard Caps: Limits prevent any single expert from dominating a topic
Attestation Markers
What Does Attestation Look Like?
Curators review items and can endorse, decline, or flag for revision. There is no numerical scoring or popularity vote. An attestation means: "I stand behind this item as responsibly framed within the current evidence."
What Can Be Endorsed?
Experts can attest to items such as research bottlenecks, constraints that merit prioritized attention, emerging avenues with promising preliminary data, evidence summaries where complex findings benefit from context, and corrections where consensus refines common misunderstandings.
Attestation is qualitative and curated, not a score. Each endorsement carries a statement of what the expert stands behind and why, so users can understand the reasoning behind the view.
Consensus Requirements
For an item (e.g., a research question, constraint, or evidence summary) to be considered consensus-curated:
- It must receive attestations from multiple experts
- Those experts should represent at least two distinct fields of domain expertise
- Attestations must be current (older endorsements are flagged for review)
This requirement protects against monoculture and moves the app toward multidisciplinary convergence.
Rolling Curation Model
Curation is never finished. Items cycle back for review, new experts enter the pool, old endorsements age out, and assumptions are periodically re-examined as evidence evolves. This prevents:
- Knowledge stagnation
- Early-adopter dominance
- Siloed consensus within a single specialty
- Permanent canonization of outdated interpretations
Temporal Decay
Endorsements expire on a schedule (e.g., 12 36 months depending on topic volatility). Expired endorsements remain visible as historical markers, but items automatically re-enter the review pool. This keeps the corpus responsive to new trials, updated guidelines, and evolving scientific consensus.
Who Can Become a Curator?
Curators must meet strict eligibility criteria reflecting professional experience, methodological rigor, and good-faith scientific credibility. Because cancer touches nearly every field, eligibility is intentionally multidisciplinary. Examples include:
- Clinicians across specialties who encounter cancer care, screening, or complications
- Researchers with peer-reviewed work relevant to cancer biology, treatment, prevention, or outcomes
- Pharmacology and drug-development experts (oncology and adjacent therapeutic areas)
- Biostatistics, epidemiology, health economics, and outcomes researchers
- Imaging, pathology, diagnostics, and laboratory medicine specialists
- Nursing, rehabilitation, survivorship, and supportive-care specialists
- Public health, implementation science, ethics, and policy experts relevant to cancer systems
Each prospective curator goes through credential verification, which may include documentation of training, publication record, clinical roles, or institutional affiliation.
Verification Process
Trellis: Cancer uses a hybrid verification model prioritizing transparency over centralized credential policing:
- Self-submitted credentials with supporting documentation
- Public profiles (institutional affiliation and domain expertise)
- Optional anonymity with private verification dossier (for safety)
- Attestations logged with metadata (date, rationale, field identifiers)
- Periodic audits for quality and consistency
Diversity of Expertise
Curators represent diverse specialties including (but not limited to) medical oncology, surgical oncology, radiation oncology, pathology, molecular biology, pharmacology, biostatistics, epidemiology, survivorship, and patient-centered outcomes. Geographic and disciplinary diversity is actively tracked and encouraged.
Recognition & Incentives
Curators are not paid. Incentives are reputational and mission-aligned:
- Public curator profiles with attribution on endorsed items
- Optional curator essays (methods, interpretation notes, research context)
- Contribution to a long-term knowledge commons
- Influence without platform capture or institution branding
Anti-Capture Mechanisms
The curation system includes hard-coded safeguards to prevent any individual, institution, specialty, or era from dominating the knowledge corpus.
Hard Caps (Non-Negotiable)
Per curator, per review cycle:
- Total attestations: capped to prevent endorsement fatigue and dominance
- Per topic: caps prevent a single expert from saturating a domain
- Per domain: limits prevent overrepresentation of one specialty
These caps are enforced by the system, not social norms. Limits ensure sustainable curation at scale while increasing the weight of each attestation.
Diversity Constraints
- No consensus status without multiple fields represented
- Domain labels are curator-declared and publicly visible
- Geographic and disciplinary diversity tracked over time
- System alerts when diversity thresholds aren't being met
Stewardship Authority
Trellis is independently built and maintained. To protect the quality and integrity of the platform, the maintainer retains limited authority to intervene when necessary.
This authority is structural, not scientific. It exists to preserve fair process, prevent misuse, and ensure the system functions as intended.
The maintainer may:
- Remove attestations when appropriate (e.g., fraud, policy violations)
- Pause or reopen items if review or curation processes are compromised
- Revoke curator access for cause, with an available appeals process
- Address attempts to manipulate, capture, or game the system
- Require conflict-of-interest disclosure and enforce COI policy
Interventions are intended to be rare, transparent, and focused solely on maintaining the integrity and purpose of the platform.
Community Accountability
Users can flag items or curator behavior. Flags trigger review (not automatic removal) and pattern-based monitoring looks for systemic issues over one-off complaints. All curator activity is logged and subject to audit.
Why This Matters
Cancer research is vast, dynamic, and often siloed. Structured expert curation enables learning from multiple authorities, highlights priorities that matter most across fields, and prevents stagnation through rolling review.
- Integrates clinical, translational, and population-level perspectives
- Makes expert reasoning visible (not just conclusions)
- Identifies bottlenecks and promising directions earlier
- Reduces repeated misinterpretations through consensus notes
- Keeps the knowledge corpus responsive to new evidence
This drives collective progress, not just isolated interpretation.
What This Is Not
Expert Curation explicitly avoids:
- A general voting system or popularity contest
- A replacement for scientific peer review
- Medical advice for individual patients
- A way to seal ideas off from critique
- Invisible gatekeeping by hidden algorithms
- Speed-over-care approvals that trade rigor for throughput
This system is designed to complement traditional peer review, accelerate alignment across disciplines, and make complex, multidisciplinary judgments visible and actionable.