IPSWICH, Mass. — January 21, 2020 — A new strategic partnership between EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and protocols.io is designed to support the research ecosystem. Researchers, publishers, and academic institutions will benefit from a research workflow that is open, connected, reproducible and interoperable. EBSCO’s investment in protocols.io highlights the importance of supporting services that extend and connect the publication of an article to its core analysis, and ongoing impact. As part of the agreement, EBSCO will leverage its global presence to expand the reach and impact of protocols.io to research institutions around the world.
protocols.io allows researchers to create and share research protocols and methods. The platform helps researchers develop, organize, troubleshoot and disseminate methods before, during and after publication. It also helps institutions maintain stewardship over an important component of research output. While protocols.io is free to anyone who shares their work openly, individual, group or site-wide enterprise licenses are available for private use.
Alexei Stoliartchouk, Irina Makkaveeva, and Lenny Teytelman co-founded protocols.io after being inspired by Lenny’s frustrations with method development during his postdoctoral research at MIT. Lenny spent a year and a half correcting one step of a previously published protocol. Because it was just a correction rather than a new technique, he had no good way of communicating this knowledge to other scientists using the same method. When starting protocols.io, Irina Makkaveeva said, “As a software developer, I found it absurd that scientists did not have something like GitHub for sharing their protocols.”
protocols.io CEO and co-founder Lenny Teytelman, says EBSCO’s investment puts EBSCO in good company and offers opportunities to advance the development of protocols.io. “EBSCO joins the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as a major funder of protocols.io, and as with them, the partnership brings far more than funding alone. We are also delighted to have the Genetics Society of America as a co-investor in this round.” Teytelman says, working together with EBSCO is likely to increase the adoption of protocols.io and the amount of sharing on the platform. “EBSCO is lending us the expertise, support and scale to build out our mission alongside other important startups in this new exciting ecosystem. We expect to bring the company to sustainability, far faster than would be possible without EBSCO’s involvement.”
Hundreds of journals across all types of publishers already recommend and integrate protocols.io in their diverse submission, review and publication systems. Publishers do this to support the reproducibility and visibility of their published works while also improving services they offer to their authors and editors. A growing number of leading funding organizations recommend the inclusion of reusable protocols as they view these as important to making the research they fund more useful and ultimately more impactful.
EBSCO Information Services CEO Tim Collins says this investment is a natural evolution of EBSCO’s mission to transform lives by providing reliable, relevant information when, where and how people want it. “Seeding the growth and supporting the connectivity of important and emerging components of open research is critical to ensure that innovation continues and that we can deliver the impact the research community requires.”
EBSCO Information Services Senior Vice President of Strategy Tommy Doyle says the protocols.io partnership aligns with EBSCO’s recent partnership with Arkivum and continues to leverage EBSCO’s broad portfolio of assets and relationships. “As one of the largest intermediaries of publishers, institutions and researchers, EBSCO is uniquely placed to help scale the impact of these businesses. We bring more than 75 years of industry experience and relationships to any new strategic partnership. As we look at investments, we will continue to seek ways to support the future of research.”
The announcement coincides with the announcement of EBSCOs partnership with Code Ocean which provides researchers with platforms to create, share, publish, preserve and reuse executable code and data.
About protocols.io
protocols.io was conceived in 2012 by geneticist Lenny Teytelman, and computer scientists Alexei Stoliartchouk and Irinia Makkaveeva to facilitate science communication and rapid sharing of knowledge. The protocols.io platform is an open access service for academic and industry researchers to record and share detailed up to date methods 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 research methods. The company is in Berkeley, California. More information is available at www.protocols.io.
About EBSCO Information Services
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is the leading discovery service provider for libraries worldwide with more than 11,000 discovery customers in over 100 countries. EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) provides each institution with a comprehensive, single search box for its entire collection, offering unparalleled relevance ranking quality and extensive customization. EBSCO is also the preeminent provider of online research content for libraries, including hundreds of research databases, historical archives, point-of-care medical reference, and corporate learning tools serving millions of end users at tens of thousands of institutions. EBSCO is the leading provider of electronic journals & books for libraries, with subscription management for more than 360,000 serials, including more than 57,000 e-journals, as well as online access to more than 1,000,000 e-books. For more information, visit the EBSCO website at: www.ebsco.com. EBSCO Information Services is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., a family owned company since 1944.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Vice President of Communications
EBSCO Information Services
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebsco.com
Anita Bröllochs
Director of Outreach
protocols.io
anita@protocols.io
