PHOTO: COURTESY OF BIO-PROTOCOLcontinually strive for improvements that facilitate efficient communication between
scientists,” He says.
Improving that communication depends largely on the reach of Bio-protocol. One
way that the organization hopes to expand its number of users is through its new
Ambassador Program. As one of the ambassadors, Redkar describes it as a “program
to promote this platform mainly to younger researchers—especially the undergrads
who are in the lab for the first time.” He adds, “It is just to make them aware of what
Bio-protocol is and how it would benefit them in their everyday lab work.”
The growing participation and engagement of authors and readers confirm
the beneficial role that Bio-protocol—as an organization as well as a journal—is
playing in the life sciences. As McNutt added in her editorial, exposing the issues
of reproducibility “ensures that science moves forward, through independent
verifications as well as the course corrections that come from refutations and the
objective examination of the resulting data.” That’s just what He hoped for when she
came up with the idea of Bio-protocol.
When scientists can reproduce a protocol, it helps everyone. As Zanoni says: “One
of the best things is when another lab on the other side of the world can reproduce
what you have done.”References
- M. McNutt, Science 346 , 679 (2014); available at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/
science.aaa1724. - “Request a Protocol (RaP),” Bio-101, Bio-protocol, h t t p s://b io -10 1. ne t /r ap.
Produced by the Science
Sponsored byas polyacrylamide gel casting, or how to run a protein gel, or basic microscopy
techniques,” explains Amey Redkar, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cordoba in
Spain and associate editor at Bio-protocol. “If someone works under me as an intern,
it’s a good platform to give them the link to browse or search through for the kinds of
techniques they might need in their projects.” In addition to basic protocols, Bio-
has expanded to include preprint protocols describing newly developed methods via
the “Request a Protocol” initiative ( 2 ).
Sudhir Gopal Tattikota, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Norbert Perrimon at
Harvard Medical School, sees clear benefits for researchers in Bio-protocol’s Bio-
online features. “Several readers simply approached us via the Bio-101 ‘Request a
detailed protocol’ option,” he says, “and we were able to immediately send them
detailed and stepwise protocols, which are sometimes difficult to incorporate within
research articles.”
In addition to helping readers, Bio-protocol benefits the authors as well. “It’s great
having a single, shared version of protocols,” says Maecker. “It’s made it easy for us to
refer to those protocols in other papers and easy to share them with fellow scientists.”
Plus, a Bio-protocol author must think very carefully and precisely about even the
most basic elements of a method. “The idea is to write a protocol that is as detailed
as possible—exactly which reagents, which type of plastic, which type of culture
medium, which type of seal we used,” says Zanoni. “It is very useful, because other
people who read it can reproduce your data and your experiments, and you will
be cited.”Growing the community
After more than a decade of working with life scientists around the world, the Bio-
protocol organization plans to build an even bigger community of scientists dedicated
to reproducibility. The basis of that work revolves around communication.
To make interactions even easier for life scientists, Bio-protocol includes a Q&A
section at the end of each article. But communication can always be improved. “WeThe homepage of Bio-protocol0429Product.indd 433 4/21/22 7:45 AM