Making open research practice easier for researchers: Insights from protocols.io and the Francis Crick Institute

Author: Lenny Teytelman and Beth Montague-Hellen

Research data forms the foundation of research, providing the evidence behind published articles. Ensuring all parts of research – methods, data, code, protocols – are open, ensures research can be built upon, used and reused – the result? A more equitable, fairer, and less wasteful research ecosystem.  

It is no secret that Springer Nature is firmly committed to promoting and better enabling open research practice and last year, following a collaborative partnership, protocols.io became part of the Springer Nature family. 

As one of the central platforms available to all researchers, protocols.io, supports open sharing, and since its integration into Springer Nature, many new partners have come on board to explore the impact of integrated protocol development and collaboration can have for their researchers. One such partner is the Francis Crick Institute, who share the goals of advancing open and reproducible science for societal impact. We took the opportunity to sit down with President and co-founder of protocols.io Lenny Teytelman, and Beth Montague-Hellen, Head of Library Information Services at the Francis Crick Institute to discuss open science research practices, current challenges and opportunities as well as what they believe partnerships such as this can achieve.  

Thank you both for joining us today. Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about how researchers’ open research practices and behaviors have changed over the years? 

Beth: Thank you for having me, and yes, an important place to start. Most researchers that I talk to are really keen to be engaging with open research practices to increase impact and ensure that their research is transparent and easy to build on. But, they’re really busy doing the research, so it can often be quite hard for them to take a step back and find the time to see what other ways/ how they can be making their research more open In the last couple of years we’ve been concentrating on supporting researchers around open access, preprints, open data and, to some extent, open software. With a bit of support, and once they know how and where, I’ve found most researchers are keen to jump on board. 

Lenny: Beth makes a very interesting point – time and knowledge. Uptake of open research practice is not necessarily for lack of wanting to make research open. Most researchers are fully supportive of building on and sharing research, they just don’t always have the means to do it. When we launched protocols.io, most open science conversations were just focused on sharing data, and ways to do that were not quite fully developed. This has definitely started to change over the last few years and more support mechanisms and platforms have been introduced to help researchers do this in a simple, easily accessible and integrated way. Of course, data sharing is essential, and it has been heartening to see an expansion of expectations to include the sharing of code, reagents, and protocols. 

In your opinions, what are the biggest challenges and or opportunities facing researchers as we move towards a fully open science environment? 

Lenny: As we started to discuss earlier, I believe that one of the biggest obstacles to better adoption of open research practices is the lack of time. Sharing your data publicly requires thoughtful annotation and organisation so that others can make heads or tails of it. Sharing your code means adding comments and formatting to make it presentable. And similarly, sharing protocols, takes time to make them comprehensible and useful. 

That also means that there is an opportunity for tools that make researchers’ lives easier. If practicing open science saves time and increases efficiency for the author, and not just for the reader, then adoption will skyrocket. 

Beth: Completely agree with Lenny, time is the biggest factor here. Time to do the work, time to clean it up and to make it understandable to other researchers. But I also think that researchers don’t always have the time to learn about new opportunities or to do the horizon scanning which helps them find platforms like protocols.io. Professional services staff, librarians for example, can really support researchers in this – but again, they have to have the time to meet with us, or to attend the events we put on! 

How do partnerships, like this one, support the shared goals for open research? What do you hope to achieve/ be able to deliver to your community? 

Beth: Open Research only works when we work together. Researchers doing exciting and excellent work need support from their organisations to make that research open, and the organisations need to value it when they do. But even with the best will in the world researchers and their institutions can’t make open research happen without platform developers giving us the tools we need to share discoveries with the world.  

Where there is a real dialogue between partners, each pulling towards the goal of making research as open and transparent as possible, then we can create meaningful change much more quickly. We can ensure that biomedical advances are trustworthy and have the real potential to improve lives, which at the end of the day is what we’re all about at the Crick. 

Lenny: I want to come back to the point that  Dr. Montague-Hellen and I both raised above: researchers are busy doing research, and best practices for reproducibility and open research typically require more time. That is precisely why partnerships like this one with The Crick are so important . When a researcher learns about protocols.io at the point of publishing their findings, sharing the detailed protocol is an extra burden. Submitting a paper for any journal is already a huge task , and if you then need to create an account on protocols.io, import your protocol, and then add the link to your manuscript on top of submitting your paper– for most people, it’s just too much time and effort.  

In contrast, when the researchers have access to premium protocols.io for internal collaboration and organisation all throughout the research cycle, they are much more likely to already have all their protocols in protocols.io by the time they start writing up the results for publication.  Using protocols.io actually saves you time, makes it easier to write the paper and becomes a friendly efficiency-boosting tool instead of an extra burden at the point of submission. We are all about making it easier and integrating these services into a singular workflow for the researchers, helps that. 

I think this is why we tend to see premium users of protocols.io not only creating more private protocols but also sharing more public ones. And this dual benefit is the key win where internal use improves reproducibility and rigour, but also facilitates open research sharing over the long term.