Our Open Research Coordinator, Kerry Miller, has written the following update to users of the protocols.io platform at the University of Edinburgh. While this relates directly to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the issues raised neatly highlight the challenges and barriers that open research still faces more broadly.

On the 31st December 2024 our subscription to protocols.io will end and we have taken the difficult decision not to renew it. The reason for this is that in 2023 the company that developed protocols.io sold it to the academic publisher Springer Nature and they have decided to impose an increase in subscription cost of over 700% for 2025. Until now the subscription costs have been met from library budgets, if we continued the subscription we would need to start recouping costs directly from users and these would be somewhere in the region of £250-300 per person for 2025.

We have carefully evaluated how protocols.io is being used by staff and students and we do not feel that we can justify spending so much more for membership of this platform or that the majority of current users would be willing or able to meet the costs from their current grants. We realise that this will be disappointing and inconvenient for researchers and the Research Data Service team is here to help. If you have any questions about how this change will impact you please read the FAQ and if that does not answer all of your questions, or you would like support moving to another platform please email us using data-support@ed.ac.uk.

You can find out more on our protocols.io page https://library.ed.ac.uk/research-support/research-data-service/during/open-research-tools/protocols