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Open Science Framework (OSF). Center for Open Science, 210 Ridge McIntire Road, Suite 500, Charlottesville, VA, 22903-5083, email, [email protected], website: https:/ / osf.io.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a tool that promotes open, centralized workflows by enabling capture of different aspects and products of the research lifecycle, including developing a research idea, designing a study, storing and analyzing collected data, and writing and publishing reports or papers. It is developed and maintained by the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit organization founded in 2013 that conducts research into scientific practice, builds and supports scientific research communities, and develops research tools and infrastructure to enable managing and archiving research [1]. As an organization, the COS encourages openness, integrity, and reproducibility in research across scientific disciplines [2]. The OSF supports a variety of tools and services to assist in the research process. This review focuses primarily on the core functionality of the OSF, with brief descriptions of some of the other existing tools and services.
FEATURES
The core functionality of the OSF is its ability to create and develop projects. Very simply, a project functions as a workspace, with the design of a particular project depending on users and the type of research workflow that they are trying to manage and preserve. Users might wish to set up a project for a particular paper or specific experiment or for the work of an entire lab. To create a project, users must set up a free account with the OSF. Once logged in, users are taken to a dashboard with the option to create a project. The standard project layout includes a wiki, a log of recent activity, and spaces to upload files, add tags, and create new components (i.e., subprojects). Each user, project, component, and file is given a unique, persistent uniform resource locator (URL) to enable sharing and promote attribution. Projects can also be assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs) and archival resource keys (ARKs) if they are made publicly available. The OSF provides built-in version control that records changes to project files and previous versions through OSF Storage.
The OSF is intended to be collaborative, and users can easily add contributors to projects. The OSF supports controlled access, so project members can...