| Documenting your research plan before you collect or analyze data is one of the most effective ways to keep your work clear, organized, and trustworthy. OSF makes this easy with preregistration tools that create a time-stamped record of your study plan. Lifecycle Open Science (LOS) is research with publicly accessible plans, contents (data, materials, code), and outcomes that are linked and findable in a persistent, open location. These pieces are connected across the research lifecycle—from planning through reuse. In LOS, your research plan is the starting point that makes everything else make sense. A clear plan can reduce confusion, increase transparency, and make your research more reproducible and trustworthy.
A preregistration documents that the study exists, your research questions/hypotheses, how data will be gathered, and data analysis and interpretation plans. This makes your workflow easier to follow and decisions easier to explain later, as well as helping teams stay consistent as a project evolves. |
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| | | Document Your Research Plan on OSF |
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| Preregistration creates a clear, time-stamped record of your plan, so when questions come up later, you have documentation to return to.
OSF makes it simple to record your research plan, so your workflow is easy to follow, any changes or decisions are transparently explained, and your team has a consistent plan to follow as the project evolves. |
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| Choosing when to preregister: The ideal time to preregister is before analyzing your data, while your research questions and decision rules are still prospective. Research isn’t always linear, though, and OSF accommodates that reality.
If you have data but haven’t examined it, you can still preregister. If you’ve already looked at the data, clearly note when and how in your preregistration. If some analyses are complete, preregister future or follow-up analyses instead (sequential preregistration). If you can’t plan every detail, preregister how analytic decisions will be made.
Select a template that fits your work: OSF offers a range of preregistration templates to align with different research designs—including newly released templates. Browsing the available options before you start can help you find one that aligns with your methodology and streamlines your documentation.
Protect your ideas and timestamp your research: Every preregistration on OSF creates a timestamped record of your research plan—documenting your intentions from the start. If you're not yet ready to share publicly, you can embargo your preregistration for up to four years, keeping the contents private while still protecting your ideas from scooping.
Enhance your preregistration with metadata: After creating a preregistration, you can add metadata about resource types and funding details. This helps meet funder requirements and makes your work more discoverable to others.
Connect your plan to outputs and outcomes: Linking your preregistration to datasets, code, and manuscripts makes it easy for others—and future you—to follow the research story from intention to evidence to conclusions.
Know what to expect after you submit: Once you submit a preregistration, it enters a pending state while OSF archives it. You can choose to make it public immediately or keep it under embargo. Once released, the preregistration becomes published, gets a DOI, and is a permanent, citable record. Core content and files can’t be changed after submission, but some metadata—like title, description, contributors, and tags—can be updated.
Updates can also be made to registrations if changes are made to your research plan during the process. Clearly labeling any changes and planned vs. unplanned analyses helps readers interpret your work.
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| New OSF Community-Developed Templates |
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| | Theory-Based Predictions in Social Science Preregistration Template: Q&A with Andrew Cesare Miller
Social scientists use theory to make predictions about future events, but these predictions are rarely structured in ways that allow them to be systematically evaluated over time. Political scientist Andrew Cesare Miller recognized this challenge and developed a new preregistration approach that guides researchers in documenting theories, variables, measurable outcomes, and scope conditions. Miller shared what motivated the template’s creation, and how preregistration can strengthen social science research. |
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| | EEG and ERP Methods Template: Q&A with Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino
Designing ERP and EEG studies requires consistent methodology and detailed planning to ensure reliable and interpretable results. Researchers Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino helped create the EEG and ERP Methods template, which offers step-by-step guidance for study design to help researchers of all career stages plan effectively. In our Q&A, they discuss the impact of structured preregistration on ERP and EEG research and the wider neuroscience community. |
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| TOP 101: An Overview of the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines April 1 at 12 PM ET
The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) policy framework provides recommendations for journals, research funders, universities, and researchers about practices that can increase the verifiability of empirical research claims. TOP was updated in 2025 and contains three main parts: Research Practices, Verification Practices, and Verification Studies. This webinar will offer an overview of these components and how TOP’s tiered, modular structure is applicable to a diverse community of researchers and policymakers.
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| OSF Essentials: Monthly Deep DiveLast Thursdays of the month at 11 AM ET
This monthly series teaches researchers how to use the OSF to carry out key tasks in their workflows—including preparing preregistrations, applying FAIR metadata, using Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), and ensuring the longevity of research outputs. Each session is free to attend and highlights OSF features and resources that support these activities. Attendees receive a discount code for select self-paced training courses.
Join us for the first session, How to Use OSF Search, on March 26 to learn how to use OSF search functionality to find information on the OSF for your research needs. |
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| OSF for Organizations Every 6 weeks on Wednesday at 1 PM ET
Join COS for a monthly walkthrough of OSF's suite of paid products and services designed to help research organizations build and sustain open scholarship infrastructure. This webinar is intended for research librarians, data managers, data curators, open science coordinators, research support staff, VPR offices, and anyone exploring institutional support for open scholarship. |
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| | | Learn About Open Scholarship
Scientific rigor and transparency are key factors in making research outcomes more impactful. However, increasing rigor often requires that researchers and labs implement new practices and learn new tools. The good news is that COS offers a variety of synchronous training modules to help navigate this complexity.
We're expanding our Open Scholarship training offerings! In addition to facilitated sessions for research teams, we're launching self-paced online courses for individual researchers. These courses cover topics like preregistration, data management, intro to open scholarship, and more—allowing researchers to build skills on their own schedule and earn completion badges for their CV and LinkedIn.
Whether you're a researcher looking to strengthen your own practice or support researchers who would benefit from accessible professional development, we'd love to keep you in the loop. |
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