2 responses to “The Use of Open Protocols in Open Research”

  1. Scott Covey

    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.

  2. Nina

    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.

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