Open access methods and protocols promote open science in a pandemic - ScienceDirect

"How open-access methods and protocols publishing advanced the project’s goals

In considering a publication strategy, Milón was motivated by a common feeling of frustration: being fascinated by a new scientific publication and excited to try the new approach in his own lab but ultimately being disappointed to realize that the methods reporting wasn’t quite robust enough to faithfully recreate the experiment. Milón sees this as not only an inconvenience for himself but a broader challenge for research reproducibility. To help prevent challenges to other groups adopting their method, their results were therefore reviewed, polished, and packaged as three freely available scientific documents (Alcántara et al., 2021a; Alcántara et al., 2021b; Mendoza-Rojas, et al., 2021). The development of the method, including detailed reporting of the various optimizations and analytical comparisons that informed each component of the assay was described in Cell Reports Methods (Alcántara et al., 2021b). The methods paper provides the empirical justification for each step of the method and serves as both a general blueprint for future open-source diagnostic methods development and as a more specific template from which future modifications to any given step can be explored...."