CZI announces support for protocols.io to accelerate open, reproducible science

Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced its support for protocols.io, an open access resource that allows researchers to discover and share up-to-date science methods. CZI’s support is aimed toward saving researchers time and helping science move faster.

“Today’s grant to protocols.io accelerates the ability of scientists to rapidly share and replicate scientific methods, which are crucial to credible, reproducible experimental research,” said CZI Head of Science Cori Bargmann. “CZI Science is proud to partner with protocols.io to support open and collaborative approaches to science that help researchers build off of each other’s work.”

The grant will be administered by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, a donor-advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. As part of CZI Science’s commitment to open science, all CZI Science Request for Proposals (RFAs) require rapid sharing of community resources via open source repositories, among them protocols.io.

“We are delighted to be working with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and their grantees,” said Lenny Teytelman, geneticist and co-founder of protocols.io. “The mission of protocols.io is to encourage collaboration and to improve the efficiency of method-development and reporting; this is directly in line with CZI’s goal to accelerate research.”

protocols.io will use this grant to expand their support for online scientific communities to host and broadly disseminate their scientific protocols. One such community is the global researchers who are working to create the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), a new reference map of all cell types in the human body. CZI’s early support of pilot projects for the HCA includes 85 new projects to create collaborative computational tools in support of building the HCA, 38 pilot projects to help establish best practices and technologies, and a new RFA to create networks of three or more principal investigators who will characterize tissue in the healthy human body.

Funding for protocols.io will also support collective protocol resources for new communities of CZI-funded investigators, including future grantees who will work to find innovative solutions to neurodegenerative diseases as part of CZI’s Neurodegeneration Challenge Network. Expanding the repository of free, open scientific protocols will also benefit the wider scientific community.

About protocols.io:

Protocols.io was conceived in 2012 by geneticist Lenny Teytelman and computer scientist Alexei Stoliartchouk to facilitate science communication and rapid sharing of knowledge. The protocols.io platform is an open access service for academic and industry scientists to record and share detailed up-to-date protocols for research. It is free to read and free to publish and provides an open access hub for scientists to communicate improvements and corrections to science methods. The company is located in Berkeley, California.

About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative:

Founded by Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education, to reforming the criminal justice system. Across three core Initiative focus areas of Science, Education and Justice and Opportunity, we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy and advocacy work to help build an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone. For more information, please visit chanzuckerberg.com.