The first thing you need to do in order to use all of the features of the site is to create a free GitHub account. Please read the GitHub page to learn more about why a free GitHub account is required and how to go about creating one.
Once you're up an running with your GitHub account we'll cover the basics of protocol management such as protocol creation and editing. Please read the protocol management page to learn more about basic protocol management.
Now that you're more familiar with the site fundamentals let's cover some more advanced concepts. The first advanced concept to discuss is protocol forking. Forking is the process of using another protocol as the starting point of your own new protocol. Please read the forking page to learn more about how to fork protocols and why it's useful.
Another advanced feature to discuss is markdown. The purpose of markdown is to allow you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format that converts to structurally valid HTML. If you're unfamiliar with writing markdown it can be confusing at first glance but in reality it's very quick to learn. Please read the markdown page to learn more about markdown.
Thanks to GitHub all changes to protocols on the site are recorded. It's easy to view changes to a protocol over time and to understand what, when and why protocol changes are made. Please read the revisions page to learn more about protocol revisions.
Protocol starring is simply a way of bookmarking protocols so that you easily refer to them in the future. Please read the starring page to learn more about protocol starring.
Scientific Protocols believes in true open access and encourages you to share protocols outside of our site. There are two main ways to easily use our protocols on another site. The two ways are protocol embedding and via the API.
If you have your own site and you'd like to display your protocol on it you can embed the protocol. Embedding is a simple copy and paste process but a rudimentary knowledge of HTML is required. Please read the embedding page to learn more about embedding protocols.
Scientific Protocols exposes all of its protocol data via an application programming interface (API). This allows you to programmatically use all of our data. Basic computer programming knowledge is required to work with the API. To read more about the API please see the API page.