JMIR Research Protocols (ISSN 1929-0748) publishes peer-reviewed, openly accessible research ideas and grant proposals, study and trial protocols, reports of ongoing research, current methods and approaches, and preliminary results from pilot studies or formative research informing the design of medical and health-related research and technology innovations. Developing a grant proposal or writing a study protocol can be as much work as writing a paper - but it is often not "rewarding" as it cannot be cited (e.g. in a CV) as publication. This is about to change, as we now publish protocols and grant proposals! Publishing protocols does not only benefit the authors, but also the research community at large: For other researchers, having access to protocols of ongoing studies is invaluable to avoid duplication of efforts, and provides opportunities to learn from winning proposals and carefully developed protocols. It also opens up the possibility to give feedback early in an ongoing or planned study (e.g. pointing out flaws in the search strategy of a systematic review, or pointing the authors to studies that should be included in a meta-analysis or scoping review). JMIR has not published protocols until now, but we are happy to announce that our spin-off journal, "JMIR Research Protocols" (http://www.researchprotocols.org) is very successful in attracting submissions and is now indexed in PubMed and PMC. We look forward to your submission of a proposal, protocol, or ongoing work! JMIR Research Protocols publishes all kinds of grant proposals and protocols (funded and unfunded), e.g. a protocol for a systematic review or scoping review, a protocol or grant application for a randomized trial, an interview guide for qualitative research, or a formative evaluation (e.g. usability studies, needs analysis etc.) with a plan for further research of a technology application. Papers published in JMIR Research Protocols are carefully copyedited and will adhere to the same quality standards as papers published in JMIR, will be carefully copyedited and deposited in PubMed Central / PubMed. And if the protocol/grant proposal is already reviewed (and reviewer comments are uploaded during submission), then we are granting a 50% discount on the Article Processing Fee. Authors also receive 20% off the Article Processing Fee if they submit subsequent papers based on the protocol in JMIR. Please submit your protocol at http://www.researchprotocols.org/author (note that you can use the same username/password as for JMIR.org).