Following the acquisition of protocols.io in 2023, Springer Nature has today announced the migration of all protocols currently hosted on Protocols Exchange to the innovative platform, making protocols.io the home for the publishers’ fully open protocols. Springer Nature hosts the world’s largest collection of protocols of biomedical and life sciences protocols covering over 155,000 protocols & methods.
The transition enables authors to benefit from greater functionality and the dynamic offerings of a more collaborative platform, helping them to share, develop, and make their methods open in ways not possible with traditional platforms.
As a result of the transition to protocols.io, the publishers’ Protocols Exchange platform will be closed for new submissions by the end of Q3 2024. All protocols on the platform will be transferred to protocols.io. Alongside protocols.io, researchers choosing to publish with Springer Nature, will still have the option to publish their protocols/methods in peer-reviewed publications (searchable via Springer Nature Experiments).
Speaking of the content migration and protocols offering, Harsh Jegadeesan, Chief Publishing Officer Springer Nature said:
“Researchers have high expectations of the services and functionality that platforms should offer them, ensuring they can focus their time on where it is best spent – on the research. Traditional protocols and methods workflows typically do not enable dynamic sharing, collaboration and interaction, which can limit the ways in which research can then be reused and built upon. We are incredibly proud of what we were able to build with Protocols Exchange, laying the foundation for the sharing of scientific methods. This transition means that we continue to offer our community the best in product support, as well as simplified workflows to enable easy sharing and ensure research impact beyond academia – helping find solutions to our world’s greatest challenges.”
Lenny Teytelman, President and founder of protocols.io added:
“In a sense, Nature created the first preprint server for protocols in 2006 with the launch of Protocols Network (which became Protocol Exchange in 2010). When the team and I started protocols.io in 2014, we saw our effort as an extension of the Protocol Exchange mission. This new phase feels like a
particularly meaningful and natural step in combining our forces and vision for a more open and reproducible research environment. One that would not be possible for protocols.io or Protocol Exchange individually.”
More on Springer Nature’s commitment to open research can be read here.
