Sharing research methods on open platforms fosters transparency, enabling others to access, understand, and replicate the work. This practice enhances the reliability of findings and encourages broader collaboration and knowledge exchange within the research community.
For this activity, you will look at different open protocols on the sharing platform, https://www.protocols.io/. Protocols.io is a “platform for developing and sharing reproducible methods”.
Navigate the protocols.io website to locate publicly available protocols. For information on how to navigate the website, visit their FAQ page.
Identify several examples of protocols that are explicitly designated as “open” or have broad sharing permissions. Optional: watch this Open UBC event, Making Methods Move: Toward Protocol Sharing Across the Disciplines, with Marcel LaFlamme on sharing open protocols.
Consider the potential benefits and challenges of using and adapting open protocols in research.
Complete this Activity
To complete the activity, share the following:
Post a comment reflecting on how the openness of these protocols contributes to transparency and reproducibility in science.
Image credit: big-data-7644537_1280 by jensenartofficial, under the Pixabay Content License.
Prior to the module on Open Data, I had never heard of this protocol platform, which no in hindsight seem incredible. A major issue in research studies, especially in the early steps, is protocols change as we develop the system. In much of our current outputs, publications, abstracts and theses, the methods must be generalized to account for all the distinct experiments, severely limiting utility towards reproducibility. Such a platform allows for linking particular data sets to specific details of the protocol, allowing full details and a way to assess if the methods align with best practices. The transparency that this platform offers is good for the researcher, research team, peer review, the scientific community, and full public access. I am already thinking about how I bring this into my teaching lab.
This protocol sharing platform was new to me and I was quite impressed with it. With a quick search, I was able to find several protocols directly related to work I’m doing in my lab in health science. As our work is interdisciplinary, we often run into issues of trying to adopt new methods or protocols into our lab. I’m very aware of the struggle of trying to reproduce an experiment or assay using only the methods section of a published paper to go off of. There is almost always information missing or a lack of sufficient detail. I was struck at the level of detail included in the protocols.io website. This would definitely improve reproducibility! One small potential challenge I could see with the use of this tool is that with the inclusion of more detail, one potentially opens oneself up to more criticism as to the decisions made. However, I believe the benefit to science if this was widely embraced would be extraordinary.