Protocols.io and New England Biolabs® partner to improve experimental method sharing and communication amongst scientists.

BERKELEY, Calif, and IPSWICH, Mass., May 14, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Protocols.io and New England Biolabs (NEB^®) today announced a collaboration to improve the online sharing of scientific methods that will help to increase both the speed and reproducibility of research.

The goal of the new online platform protocols.io is to provide scientists the ability to easily share experimental methods, including any improvements made to them. Lenny Teytelman, cofounder of protocols.io, spent over a year of his postdoctoral research at MIT discovering that a single step of a commonly used scientific method had been incorrectly documented. "I realized there was no easy way for researchers to share such knowledge with their peers, as well as the broader scientific community," Lenny explains. "Scientists are constantly re-discovering what others have not had the time to publish, and improving existing methods without the ability to share these improvements with the world. Academic publishing has hardly changed from the days of Mendel, and the purpose of protocols.io is to bring scientific communication into the 21^st century," Lenny continues.

As part of the partnership, NEB has been working with protocols.io to add the most popular NEB protocols to the platform. These protocols are not just viewable, but can be "followed" (step-by-step), either on the protocols.io website or mobile device, while the scientist is actually doing the work. This allows the researcher to track where they are in the given method and to record any changes that they introduce. More importantly, this will enable scientists to change the protocols online, according to their needs. Scientists will then be able to keep those modifications private or share them publicly, as well as find comments, optimizations and/or other updates from other scientists, including those at NEB.

"NEB was the first commercial player to work with protocols.io and has been very supportive of our project over the past year. Collaborating with NEB has helped to get this repository off the ground with high quality methods," adds Alexei Stoliartchouk, cofounder of protocols.io.

Andy Bertera, Executive Director of Marketing at NEB, added "New England Biolabs has always been a strong supporter of open access and improving scientific communication. We have been very impressed by the protocols.io platform and its potential to foster the sharing of improvements to both routine and more complex experimental procedures."

For more information on the new protocols.io platform, please visit: http://www.protocols.io/neb.
The Android protocols.io app is available on Google Play. (The redesigned iOS app is coming soon.)

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 a free open access service for academic and industry scientists to record and share detailed up-to-date protocols for research.  It provides an open access hub for scientists to share improvements and corrections to science methods. The company is located in Berkeley, California.

About New England Biolabs

Established in the mid 1970's, New England Biolabs, Inc. (NEB) is the industry leader in the discovery and production of enzymes for molecular biology applications and now offers the largest selection of recombinant and native enzymes for genomic research. NEB continues to expand its product offerings into areas related to PCR, gene expression, sample preparation for next generation sequencing, synthetic biology, glycobiology, epigenetics and RNA analysis. Additionally, NEB is focused on strengthening alliances that enable new technologies to reach key market sectors, including molecular diagnostics development. New England Biolabs is a privately held company, headquartered in Ipswich, MA, and has extensive worldwide distribution through a network of exclusive distributors, agents and seven subsidiaries located in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the UK. For more information about New England Biolabs visit www.neb.com.

NEB^® and NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS^® are registered trademarks of New England Biolabs, Inc.

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SOURCE New England Biolabs

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