News & Comment

Springer Nature recently acquired protocols.io, an open-access platform for developing and sharing protocols, which will replace the Protocol Exchange from June 2024.

In 2023, Nature Protocols launched four new collections (on organoids, neural probes, cognitive neuroscience frameworks and neurostimulation) to help readers navigate our content and highlight areas of particular current interest.

There have been some changes to the editorial team at Nature Protocols in 2022 that represent the end of one era and the start of another.

Nature Protocols has traditionally published protocols for use in biological or biomedical research but has recently expanded its scope to include protocols for clinical practice.

Nature Protocols is pleased to be a part of the Resource Identification Initiative, a project aimed at improving the reproducibility of research by clearly identifying key biological resources. Stable unique digital identifiers, called Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), are assigned to individual resources, allowing users to accurately identify and source them, track their history, identify known problems (such as cell line contamination and misidentification) and find relevant research papers. Following a successful 6-month trial, we will now require authors to provide RRIDs for all antibodies and cell lines used in their protocols. We will also be encouraging them to add RRIDs for other tools (such as plasmids and organisms) where they think this is helpful.

The Protocol Exchange (our open and free protocol repository) has a new website that allows authors to upload their protocols more easily and update them via versioning. There is also new functionality for readers, who can highlight and annotate specific parts of the text, view reader metrics (citations, views and comments) and discover similar protocols in the ‘More from Protocol Exchange’ section.

Nature Protocols launches a new Review-style article type, the Tutorial.

On 27th June 2006, ten years ago this week, Nature Protocols officially published its first batch of protocols. In celebration of this fact, we are breaking with tradition to publish our first non-protocol articles: this editorial, as well as an upcoming series of Perspectives that showcase methodological developments over the last decade.