The importance of sharing protocols in pre-clinical TBI

ODC-TBI works through the PRECISE-TBI project, the PRE-Clinical Interagency ReSearch ResourcE for TBI, which aims to improve translation in TBI research through the development of standards, best practices, and key data / knowledge resources for pre-clinical TBI research. The PRECISE project is utilizing the Protocols.io platform to host high quality and standardized protocols for preclinical TBI to help reduce the variability of model usage between laboratories and ensure that all key steps in a protocol are recorded. PRECISE-TBI is hosting protocols for the major classes of preclinical models through a public workspace on the Protocols.io platform. 

Why Protocols.io? Protocols.io is a platform dedicated to publishing and working with experimental protocols. It provides many great features to create, copy, use and share experimental protocols. Protocols are fully version controlled, making it easy to copy or “fork” these protocols to customize them as necessary for a given application. At the same time, the relationship between these related protocols can be tracked across versions, in order to compare results using different permutations. It is a social site, where you can engage in a discussion over any step and, like popular internet recipe sites, you can indicate whether it “works for you”to give you confidence when selecting a protocol. Protocols.io treats protocols as full scientific works, without the limitations imposed by journals on methods sections,  that can be published, shared and referenced with a DOI.  

At ODC-TBI, we encourage you to link your datasets to experimental protocols. These protocols provide the critical context for how the data was produced, and help others reproduce your data.  In the world of big data analytics, comparing key protocol details across datasets help to interpret data patterns.  ODC-TBI allows you to upload your protocol as a text file, but you can also deposit your protocols in Protocols.io and link them to your data set (See How do I attach a protocol to my dataset). Depositing them in Protocols.io increases the visibility and reuse of your work, as well as providing all the benefits listed above.

PRECISE has prepared a short video tutorial to help post a protocol in the PRECISE-TBI protocols.io group.

Protocols.io provides detailed tutorials on creating and publishing protocols. Or feel free to visit our office hours on Fridays at 11 am PT or contact us at info@odc-tbi.org.   We are here to help.