Updated October 27, 2023

The Premium version of protocols.io—a collaborative platform and preprint server for methods and protocols—is now available free to Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health users! Funded and supported by the Countway Library, protocols.io allows you to create step-by-step detailed, interactive and dynamic protocols that can be run on mobile or web. This platform is useful for researchers in any discipline that uses a step-by-step methodology, including life sciences, engineering, chemistry, data science, and computational social sciences.

See a presentation about protocols.io given by Head of Outreach Gabriel Gasque in October 2023.

• Creating Protocols: Protocols can be made from scratch or uploaded and converted from an existing Word or PDF document quickly and easily. In addition, if you have a particularly complex protocol, the staff at protocols.io will import a protocol for you.
• DOIs & Publishing: Using the Premium version of protocols.io, you can share your protocols privately with labmates and collaborators, or publish them publicly with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) via protocols.io's open access repository. Getting a DOI for your protocol will make it easier for others to find and cite your protocols and give you credit for your work. And when you link from articles you publish to one of your own published protocols, you make your research articles more reproducible.
• ORCID Connection: You can also connect your protocols.io account with your ORCID iD, which will allow protocols.io to automatically post information about your published protocols onto the Works section of your ORCID record.

Keep reading to find out how to get started!

Getting Started

To claim your free Premium account on protocols.io, please follow these instructions.

1. Create an account using the email address of your choice. (Note, if you use the @hms.harvard.edu, @hsdm.harvard.edu, @hsph.harvard.edu email, you will become a Premium user automatically and do not need to complete the steps below.)
2. Verify your account through the verification email that will be sent to you and sign into your account on protocols.io. 
3. Go to your Workspace and click upgrade button.
4. Select Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine or Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the dropdown menu and click the verify your organization account button.
5. Enter your Harvard affiliation email address for the email verification and click verify.
6. A verification email will be sent to your email address. After your Harvard affiliation email address is verified, your account will be a Free Premium account.

For Research

Research labs or projects may be interested in taking advantage of the ability to create a group where they can organize all of their methods in one place to share. This helps make sure that important methods and protocols aren't lost when people leave the lab.

For an example of how your group can use protocols.io, check out the public protocols from the Sullivan microbiology lab at Ohio State University.

Also, watch a 2022 webinar on:

• Getting Credit and Recognition with protocols.io, presented by Gabriel Gasque, PhD, Head of Outreach at protocols.io.
• Reproducible Research at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, presented by Sarah Arena, Data Manager, and Ben Gaudio, Research Technician, both from the Harvard Program for Therapeutics Sciences (HiTS) at Harvard Medical School.

For Instructors

Instructors of lab courses and computational classes may find protocols.io useful for sharing class materials and protocols with students. Class content can be open for everyone or the instructor can choose to make it only accessible for the students. For an example of how you can use protocols.io for your course, check out the public course methods from a genomics course at the University of Arizona.