How Can Cancer Research Be Open-Sourced?

Mark asked on Quora on how can cancer research be open-sourced. So, far I found Quora to be rather noisy, even after signing up only to science related groups, themes, whatever it is called. However, every now and then there is an interesting question like this one.

The question resonated with discussions I had earlier this week. During Peter's Symposium the discussion was restarted on why publishing data in databases is currently not rewarded. I think the answer is really simple: there is no independent organization counting citation statistics. What if Thomson did not calculate citation counts and impact factors?

Would we be using them to judge the careers of fellow scientists? If FooBar would calculate H-indices based on data citations would we ignore that? I hardly think so. However, FooBar does not exists, and FooBar is not getting rich because of its citation counts.