Open-source antibodies as a path to enhanced research reproducibility and transparency

I will use my talk to champion the adoption of open-source antibodies to enhance reproducibility and transparency in biomedical research. We have established a pipeline for democratizing antibody availability through open-source antibodies, drawing a parallel to the benefits of open-source software. This entails not only making the ready-to-use antibodies available to the research community but also providing the material (plasmid or cell line) for end users to produce the antibodies themselves at low cost, and by supplying their code (i.e., the antibody sequences) for researchers to verify the identity of these critical research reagents, as well as customize them to meet their own research needs. By making computer code widely available to the user community, open-source software has greatly expanded the informed use and subsequent improvement of software, resulting in higher quality, increased security, and greater customization for end users, and being cost-effective due to its free access. We hope to achieve the same with open-source antibodies. We urge the biomedical research community to not only utilize the resources we have established, but to continue funding and supporting open-source antibody initiatives. We also encourage researchers who have developed antibodies and other binders to contribute them to these efforts, shifting access to these valuable research reagents towards an open-source model.