Overview
QuestionsObjectives
What is the Open Science Framework?
What can the OSF do for me as a researcher?
What are the limitations of the OSF?
How can I use the OSF platform responsibly?
Understand what the OSF is
Understand the basics of the OSF
The OSF (https://osf.io/) is an online collaboration and project management platform for research projects. The OSF is built and supported by the Center for Open Science (https://cos.io/), a non-profit organisation for increasing the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research.
The OSF platform allows researchers to organise projects, store data, create registrations, and publish preprints. Projects can be subdivided into components, for which public and private sharing, collaborations, licensing, and DOIs can be individually managed.
Discussion
5 minWhy should I use the OSF instead of…?
Take a few minutes to discuss with the group your current approach to project management.
- Is it the same for others in your team/lab/field?
- Do you work with collaborators?
- How do you share files?
The key capabilities of the OSF which matter to most researchers are project management, data storage, and collaboration.
The aim of the OSF is to be useful enough to working researchers that the sharing and registration features are simply useful additions.
The OSF platform allows you to create projects, which can have include files and directories, a license, a wiki, and third-party components (like Google Drive folders, Zotero libraries, and much, much more).
Each project can have any number of components, which are exactly like projects - they can also have files and directories, licenses, etc., and they can have different collaborators and be made public or private independently of the main project. Components can also have other components.
You can store data directly on the OSF platform, in a section in Files called ‘OSF Storage’. You can store data in one of three locations, including Frankfurt, Germany, in the EU. Private projects can store up to 5gb of data per component (but you can have as many components as you like); public projects can have up to 50gb/component. You can also link several other storage platforms, like Google Drive or DropBox, which will list your files in your project without counting towards your used space. Any files listed, even those in external storage, are assigned their own unique URL, and the OSF previewer will do its best to generate a preview of the file at that URL, as well as allowing visitors to download the file. Here, for example, is one of the data dictionary files from the project shown above.
The OSF is designed with sharing and collaboration in mind.
This means that even if you aren’t ready to share your project with the public, you can easily add collaborators and define what they are allowed to do with your project.
Collaborators on the project can be listed as bibliographic contributors, meaning they get included in the citation.
You can even share a view-only version of your project anonymously: e.g. to allow for blind peer review.
If and when you feel like it, you can make individual components or your entire project public, to share your work with the world. Because the platform records when things were uploaded, it can establish primacy of ideas even if you do not share the work until later.
At any stage, you can create a frozen copy of your project as a registration, alongside a registration document which details your current plans for your project. This is a good way of tracing the evolution of a project and ensuring that confirmatory tests are distinct from exploratory tests.
Key Points
The OSF is a project management and file storage platform provided by the Centre for Open Science
The OSF supports registration, collaboration, and archiving
Private projects have a 5GB storage limit; public projects 50GB