Open Science Framework

Developed by the non-profit, Center for Open Science, OSF has a number of features that support open and reproducible research. There are many reasons to practice more open research including so that others can more easily discover, reproduce, or reuse parts of your work and cite them, so there is added transparency in how you conducted research or found results, and so that you yourself can remember exactly what you did when you need to recreate an analysis later. OSF allows users to publicly share entire projects or parts of projects, assign them a permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and select an appropriate license for reuse.

Getting Started

Launch Open Science Framework

• The Libraries' institutional license for OSF allows researchers to use Shibboleth Single Sign-On to access their accounts with their Andrew IDs. Users will then be able to sync their CMU Box accounts to their OSF accounts. A public landing page for OSF at CMU will showcase public projects from CMU researchers.
• Use your CMU email address to create an account and can sync all other third party applications to your account.
• Note: If you already have an OSF account, either with your CMU email address or any other email address, OSF will send you a notification of the CMU Institutional subscription this summer and you will be given the option to migrate your account to login with your Andrew ID. This will then allow any of your public projects to be discovered on the CMU OSF landing page.

Learn more in the Open Science Framework Research Guide.

Service Details

OSF is a great way to keep track of all of the different files that are part of a complex research project. You can store files directly on OSF cloud storage (unlimited number of individual files that are under 5 GB each) or sync popular third-party applications such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3, GitHub, figshare, Mendeley, and Zotero to the project. You can add collaborators from CMU or anywhere else to a project and set their access so that they can view or edit parts of a project. You can also use OSF to share your work publicly so that it can be cited. Overall, it's a powerful tool for research management, documentation, and collaboration that can help you see the sum of your work across many different platforms.

You can also use the platform to preregister or register a study to publicly demonstrate your plans for the work at different time points. OSF Preprints allows you to post preprints of work as unpublished and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts, to share your work quickly ahead of publication.

We teach regular workshops on Open Science Framework. Check our Libraries workshops to see if there are any upcoming OSF workshops. You can also download our workshop slides.