As a grassroots effort, Bio-protocol is building a community to foster interactions about
the fine details of methodology in the life sciences.Reproducing results lies at the heart of life sciences, but it’s a difficult challenge. “The
complexity of what we do is so high, and there are so many variables that we try to
control as much as we can, but that’s the real reason why the reproducibility is so
hard,” says Ivan Zanoni, associate professor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School
and associate editor at Bio-protocol. As a journal—and now a major influencer in the
scientific world—Bio-protocol is taking on that challenge.
“It just has to do with the facts of biology,” says Holden Maecker, director of the
Human Immune Monitoring Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine
and advisor to Bio-protocol. “It’s difficult to know which variables are going to be
important for a given kind of experiment.”
As a first step toward clarity and consistency, scientists need to communicate
more about the precise details of a protocol. As then Science editor-in-chief Marcia
McNutt wrote in 2014: “A transparent and rigorous approach ... can almost always
shine a light on issues of reproducibility” ( 1 ). The lack of such an approach spawned
the Bio-protocol concept.Addressing the problem
In 2010, as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, bacterial expert Fanglian
He started working on a new project, but she struggled to replicate methods from
published research articles. She recalls, “It was very frustrating to spend time
troubleshooting a method other people had already used successfully.” In talks
with colleagues, she learned that they were facing similar problems. So, in 2011, He
launched Bio-protocol, where she is now the publisher.
This journal and its programs have a straightforward mission, as described by
Caroline Shamu, associate dean for research cores and technology at Harvard Medical
School and editor-in-chief of Bio-protocol: “It’s a place to publish well-documentedprotocols relating to biology.” Those protocols range from everyday methods to the
latest trends. Plus, Bio-protocol continues the passion that led He to start this journal.
Looking to help build a community rather than make a profit, Bio-protocol is free to
read and includes more than 4,000 protocols.
Creating such a community depends on a broad-based interdisciplinary team,
and associate editors make up a key component. In the summer and fall of 2021,
the Bio-protocol editorial team convened a series of virtual check-in interviews with
the associate editors. “It was great to see their enthusiasm to make improvements,”
Shamu says. “They made the effort to attend across many time zones.”
To further expand Bio-protocol’s reach, it has formed strategic collaborations with
other publications and organizations, including eLife and Science/AAAS.Putting the program to use
Any scientist who ever tried to replicate a protocol knows how difficult it can be
without adequate information. “Open access to highly detailed protocols is essential
for research,” says Wolf B. Frommer, Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Heinrich-
Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf and a member of the Leopoldina, the German National
Academy of Sciences. “It saves an immense amount of effort and funds if protocols are
as detailed as they are on the Bio-protocol website, since there are always little tricks
or pitfalls that can be easily avoided with sufficient information.”
A 2018 survey conducted by Bio-protocol shows that the plan is working. Of nearly
6,500 hundred scientists who downloaded protocols between October 2017 and
January 2018, more than 1,500 responded to the survey. Of the approximately 700
scientists who had tried the protocols they had downloaded, 91% of them were able to
reproduce the experiment. This means that scientists can turn to Bio-protocol to find
tried-and-tested, reproducible methods that can be added to a lab’s toolbox.
Bio-protocol also runs a sister database called Bio-101, which is an open
platform for sharing protocols as well as asking and answering questions. “This is
a very nice platform, which documents all of the everyday basic protocols—suchAdvertorial
Taking on reproducibility with a team
PHOTO: COURTESY OF BIO PROTOCOLB i o - p r o t o c o l journal coversBio-protocol is a strategic collaborator with S c i e n c e/AAAS in support of scientific reproducibility.
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