protocols.io

Handled by competent reviewers with good editors, pre-publication peer review improves the submitted papers. However, improving quality is not the same as ensuring it. A typical reviewer is unlikely to verify the scripts and rerun analyses reported in a genomics paper. Similarly, it would be highly unusual for a reviewer of an experimental molecular biology paper to dash to the lab and attempt to reproduce the reported results as part of checking the paper.

The peer review that can truly verify any given paper is the gradual process of replication and extension of the published work over time. When authors of a given paper or other researchers follow up on a publication – then and only then – do we really catch mistakes, improve, and verify the work. This is why it is so important to report not only the results, but the code, data, and the detailed methods used to produce these results. This is why the efforts of publishers like GigaScience are so important.

We were driven to create protocols.io by the desire to establish a central place where scientists can share and discover optimizations and corrections of published methods; our hope is that through versioning and collaborative sharing post-publication, methods can evolve and remain up-to-date, long after the original publication.

Excellent example of such community review:

https://www.protocols.io/view/cut-run-targeted-in-situ-genome-wide-profiling-wit-mgjc3un

Any registered user is allowed to comment.

Yes

We try to expose all possible metrics that may be helpful in assessing whether a protocol is likely to work. Each public protocol has a dedicated "metrics" tab with this information.

Example: https://www.protocols.io/view/cut-run-targeted-in-situ-genome-wide-profiling-wit-mgjc3un/metrics

The protocols.io platform is free to read and share for public content. For private collaboration, there is a limit of 5 free private protocols per user, requiring a $5/month subscription above that.

100-1,000