Twenty Years of Sharing: Expanding Accessibility

When Addgene opened in 2004, we focused on creating a repository that made it easy to share plasmids, both for people depositing plasmids and for people requesting them. Prior to this, many plasmids were available, but they often weren’t easily accessible, due to a wide range of logistical barriers. Addgene worked to identify, reduce, and remove these logistical barriers, allowing people to access a wide catalog of plasmids from all over the world. This idea that available and accessible weren’t always the same thing shaped both Addgene’s founding and growth into the company we are today. As part of our 20th anniversary celebration, we thought it only fitting to share some stories of ways we’ve turned the available into the accessible.

Physical access

Addgene is located in the USA, but our materials are available to any country that we can export to — so far, we’ve shipped materials from our repository to an amazing 111 countries (Figure 1)! But while we were making them available to many countries, import and export regulations, differing customs processes, and the distances the packages needed to travel meant the accessibility of our materials varied country to country.

 

Figure 1: Number of countries Addgene distributes to per year, 2005-2023.

We identified and offered a number of solutions that increased accessibility, such as using couriers that refill dry ice if the package stays in transit for a certain number of days and tracking average transit time for each courier we contracted with so we can always offer the fastest shipping. However, there were issues that persisted despite our best efforts. With a little over half of our orders coming from researchers outside the USA, having some materials available to order, yet not consistently accessible, wasn’t an option.

So we identified countries that would benefit from a third-party “helper”: a distributor who, among other things, could ensure our packages navigated customs and arrived at their destination in a timely manner and at the correct temperature. To date, we have partnered with six distributors (Table 1), in China, Korea, Japan, Brazil, India, and Mexico.

Table 2: Addgene distributors

Distributor	Partnership Start Date	Country Served
Beijing Zhongyuan	2012	China
Summit Pharmaceuticals International	2013	Japan
Leehyo Bioscience	2015	Korea
San Diego Biotech Lab	2018	Mexico
e-nnovation Life Sciences	2020	India
Sinapse Biotecnologia	2022	Brazil

In some cases, the distributors broadly helped increase access in the country, and we can see a growth in material distribution after we partnered with them (Figure 2). In others, the distributor helped solve an issue specific to that country. ‌For example, when we began offering temperature-sensitive materials, we noticed a large percentage of these shipments arrived in India at room temperature. Partnering with our distributor allowed us to ensure that temperature-sensitive materials like viral preps and libraries were kept at the appropriate temperature for the duration of their journey.

Figure 2: Annual distribution of items to countries with a distributor. Arrows indicate the year we entered into an agreement with a distributor for that country.

In China, direct shipments weren’t able to clear import control. Partnering with a distributor allowed us to share materials and accept deposits from scientists in China. They were also able to help with sharing information through the use of popular Chinese social media platforms. 

As you can imagine, shipping to so many countries means that our shipping team is always engaged in some form of problem-solving. When universal solutions aren’t enough to ensure accessibility, partnering with distributors who have expertise in a specific country can quickly reduce a large number of barriers. Though we haven’t solved every shipping issue for every country, we’re continuing to use our data and resources to increase accessibility to researchers around the globe.

Addgene’s educational resources

As Addgene built out our scientific support services, we realized that another availability vs accessibility issue was found in a less tangible form: knowledge and information about the materials in our repository.

We started to increase accessibility to our repository by making it easier to find materials and learn about them. As early as 2007, we began grouping similar tools together in what would eventually become our collection pages. These pages allowed researchers to easily access and compare their options for tools such as empty backbones, lentiviral packaging systems, and luciferase expression. On individual material pages, we added curation fields for purpose, promoters, expression types, and more, all of which help a researcher understand if a material is right for their experiment.  

Table 1: Most popular guides, protocols, and collections of 2023.

Educational Resource	Top Five by Views
Guides	CRISPR Guide Lentiviral Guide AAV Guide Optogenetics Guide γ-Retrovirus Guide
Protocols	Agarose Gel Electrophoresis Bacterial Transformation How to Design a Primer Creating Bacterial Glycerol Stocks Inoculating a Liquid Bacteria Culture
Collections	Lentiviral Plasmids Tetracyline Inducible Plasmids Empty Backbones Bacterial Expression Systems AAV Plasmids
Blogs	Origin of Replication What is a Plasmid? How to Design Your gRNA for CRISPR Editing The Promoter Region - Let's Go! How to Verify Your Plasmid Using a Restriction Digest Analysis
Videos	What is a Plasmid? How to Design Primers for PCR Agarose Gel Electrophoresis Inoculating Liquid Bacterial Cultures Restriction Digest Analysis

We also introduced guides — practical primers to help users get started with tools like CRISPR, lentivirus, and optogenetics — and shared the protocols we use in our own labs. By 2023, we had 47 protocols and 12 guides available on our website, which are regularly used by scientists around the world. Collectively, our 12 guides, 47 protocols, and 186 collection pages received over two million views in 2023, from visitors in 218 countries. In Table 1, you can see our most popular educational resources for each type of resource we offer. 

In 2013, we launched the Addgene blog for topics that required a lot of nuance or detail. By the end of 2023, we had over 900 posts, which were read by researchers all over the world — and we really do mean all over (Figure 3). We continue to add new posts every week, and we’ve made our popular blog series even more accessible by collecting and formatting all 101s on a particular topic into beautifully designed and easy-to-reference eBooks.

Figure 3: Global readership of the Addgene blog in 2023. Views from a country are represented in blue; darker blue indicates more views from that country.

While written resources are valuable, there does come a time when a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to protocols. In 2013, we launched the Addgene YouTube channel to add a strong visual component to our educational resources. From 2013–2023, we published 110 videos, which received over two million views from 119 different countries (Figure 4). Four of the five most popular videos are protocol videos, where showing exactly how to execute a step can provide needed clarity (Table 1). Our most popular video, however, is “What is a Plasmid?”, An animated explainer of a plasmid and its parts that helps the viewer visualize something that cannot be seen with the naked eye. In 2023 alone, viewers spent over 22,000 hours watching these and other videos on Addgene’s YouTube channel.  

Figure 4: Global viewership of the Addgene YouTube channel, 2023. Views from a country are represented in blue; darker blue indicates more views from that country.

Stats and figures are helpful, but our favorite measure of our educational resources’ value is feedback from the researchers who use them. The best part of any conference is scientists, from techs to grad students to professors, stopping by to say, “Everything I know about virus, I learned from Addgene,” or “I learned to clone from the Addgene website.” We delight in seeing our resources shared via social media, on collaborators’ websites, or as a recommendation in a Reddit thread crowdsourcing experimental help. We love it when a researcher reaches out to ask if they can help us create or update a needed resource, and when they tell us how they use our resources — in their classroom, in their lab, in their experiments, to enable virtual learning during the pandemic. Feedback like that lets us know that Addgene’s materials and information are truly accessible, not just available.  

Looking forward

Over the past twenty years, Addgene has made huge strides in increasing the accessibility of our repository, from physical materials to useful information, but we’re not done yet… in fact, we may never be!

We’ve learned that increased accessibility is achieved through interconnected incremental changes. It was only after creating a plasmid repository and shipping internationally, after all, that we could identify the need for distributors in some countries. ‌We’ve developed systems to allow for easier access to export-controlled items by streamlining permissions and paperwork. Through updating and expanding our website, we’ve learned about the importance of smaller, systemic changes, like using alt-text, captions, and inclusive design in our digital content. We have implemented proactive measures to find potential barriers that may not be obvious from end-point data, like our ongoing website survey on addgene.org. Currently, we’re evaluating our depositor process to identify and reduce barriers for scientists wanting to share their tools with Addgene. 

In our next twenty years, we can’t be certain what barriers we’ll identify or what steps we’ll take to reduce them. But we do know we will continue to ask “What can we do to make our materials both available and accessible to scientists across the globe?” By asking this question, and by listening to the answers from our community, we’ll be able to better understand the barriers to easier, faster, more reproducible science and learn what Addgene can do to help.

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More resources on the Addgene blog

Twenty Years of Addgene Sharing: CRISPR
Twenty Years of Sharing: Addgene's Viral Vector Service