OSF (Open Science Framework)

OSF has surpassed 600,000 registered users, and passed 500,000 in 2022 (currently adding >370 per day). These users representing all domains of science and engineering have registered more than 122,000 studies, created more than 616,000 projects, stored more than 18M files, publicly shared more than 9.1M of those files, and posted more than 125,000 papers. Research consumers do not need to register an account to view and download public content on OSF. The yearly consumer user base is more than 10x the size of the cumulative registered users base with >21 million unique visitors that viewed >54 million files and downloaded ~52 million files in 2022 alone.

OSF has two central differentiators from other tools in the marketplace supporting open science. The first is OSF’s unique, secure, open-source architecture that supports integrations with other tools and services that researchers rely on. OSF connects the phases and contents of the research lifecycle together and enables fluid public and private research management to increase efficiency and reduce time needed for re-uploading, moving, or looking for resources. The second is that OSF supports lifecycle open science. OSF can be used as a retrospective repository to share research data and other assets after the research project is completed. But, its core value proposition is that it supports the researcher from conception through completion, consumption, and re-use. By supporting the entire lifecycle, OSF makes researchers more efficient, makes their work more rigorous, and makes it easier to connect and share some or all of the history and products of the research.

The COS team continually engages with users and stakeholders to understand the ways collaborators, data consumers, and funders need to search and browse the corpus of public research output on OSF. Years of feedback were integrated with new user testing, which focused on discovery features that would provide the most value for researchers. Further analysis determined how users would expect the features to work and how results would be interpreted. Finally, we overlapped this feedback with other stakeholder needs, like funder programs and institutional administrators that are working with research communities to more effectively track and report research plans and results. The result of the community and stakeholder input is a new discovery solution on OSF with a suite of brand new search features, making it easier and faster to find OSF content that meets their precise needs. These same features provide unique insights for institutional administrators, funder program officers, and librarians, including more ways to find relevant funding opportunities and interdisciplinary or inter-institutional collaborations. Most critically the new discovery features, in addition to the robust metadata enabled on OSF, enables researchers and research institutions to meet funder and publisher data sharing commitments.