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OSF projects provide a flexible space for researchers to plan, collaborate, and organize their studies. Projects on OSF are more than just folders—they’re spaces where you can connect and describe everything from data and code to pre-analysis plans and publications, creating a central place to represent your research activity.
This month’s newsletter highlights ways to streamline your research team’s collaborative projects, with guidance on common challenges including file management, contributor roles, and version control. Check out these tips—and inspiration from other collaborative OSF projects—to help you make the most of the OSF’s user-friendly tools for seamless research collaboration at every scale.
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Quick Tips: Enhancing Team Projects on OSF
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- Effectively Organize Materials Based on Your Use Case: Use OSF’s project structure and folder organization to keep materials up-to-date and clearly defined. Do you really like the structure of a project? Use it as a template and make a copy for yourself! Here are a few project templates to get you started.
- Set Clear Roles and Permissions: Assign contributor roles and permissions to maintain accountability and ensure smooth workflows. On OSF, you can set different permission levels for each contributor on each project and component (a sub-project), allowing for flexible collaboration and control over project access.
- Track and Share Work Seamlessly: Use version control to keep track of your research materials and ensure transparency and reproducibility. OSF has built-in version control for files stored in your project and can render hundreds of different file types directly in your browser.
- Integrate External Tools with Add-Ons: Simplify workflows by connecting OSF to external platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub for more streamlined data management and sharing. Plus, the new and enhanced OSF add-ons service extends the platform's functionality by enabling users to integrate their preferred third-party tools directly into OSF.
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COS Project Highlight: Advancing Collaborative Research
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Ensuring research transparency and reproducibility requires strong project organization, clear documentation, and open collaboration. The Center for Open Science’s (COS) Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, for example, engaged hundreds of researchers to assess the replicability of more than 7,000 research claims, using OSF to ensure transparency and data accessibility.
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Now, the Predicting Replicability Challenge aims to diversify and expand this work by advancing automated methods for evaluating research claims and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and machine learning experts, and social-behavioral scientists. Open to both academic and non-academic participants, the challenge broadens engagement in research evaluation.
Large-scale collaborative efforts like SCORE and the Predicting Replicability Challenge highlight the critical role of teamwork in addressing complex research challenges and advancing confidence in scientific findings.
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The Silent Cities Project
The Silent Cities project gathered large-scale acoustic recordings during the global COVID-19 lockdowns. Across 35 countries, 261 contributors captured high-resolution audio data—often in real time—to measure changes in urban soundscapes. In total, the team collected and analyzed over 2 million recordings.
As a collaborative team working with a very large and complex dataset, the Silent Cities researchers used OSF as a centralized repository to ensure datasets remain openly accessible, easily interpretable, and ready for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Learn more.
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Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Lab
The Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Laboratory (DPAL) is a collaborative global network of academic institutions that analyzes the quality of pharmaceuticals from developing countries.
The DPAL organizes its distributed research activities on the OSF, where it hosts methodologies for analyzing various drugs, data entry spreadsheets, a newsletter, and other materials. Each institution also has its own folder within the DPAL's OSF project. Participants can register their data in the OSF at any time, generating a permanent snapshot with a unique DOI for precise citation and version control.
Learn more.
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For more useful resources to support the sharing and discovery of your research, check out our upcoming free webinars!
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Choosing the Right Preregistration Template
March 27, 2025
11 AM ET
Preregistration can improve research by increasing transparency and rigor—but how do you know when to use a preregistration template, and which template to use? This webinar walks researchers through OSF’s preregistration templates, providing an overview of key differences and use cases.
Sign up
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Publishing with Lifecycle Journal: A Researcher’s Guide
April 10, 2025
2 PM ET
In this webinar, learn how Lifecycle Journal empowers researchers with community-led evaluation services that go beyond traditional peer review, a publishing model that allows for updates and revisions over time, and a transparent process that ensures meaningful assessment and recognition.
Sign up
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Getting Started on the OSF: A Hands-On Guide
Second Monday of each month
11 AM ET
Join our monthly webinars to explore use cases that highlight how OSF can support your open science practices and solve common problems many researchers face throughout the research lifecycle, along with a guided tour of key workflows and features.
Sign up
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OSF Institutions for Librarians and Research Support Staff
First Thursday of each month
1 PM ET
Register for this monthly webinar to learn more about OSF Institutions, a flexible workspace designed to support librarians, research data managers, and professionals who assist researchers across disciplines and institutions.
Sign up
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We are always looking for volunteers to help give feedback on the newest updates of the OSF. If you are interested in providing feedback in the form of surveys and focus groups, please fill out our contact enrollment form below and we will be in touch with opportunities to get involved!
Sign up form here. |
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OSF is developed and maintained by the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. COS works to transform the culture of scientific research by developing open research technologies, offering training resources, engaging with research communities, conducting metaresearch, and partnering for change with science funders, institutions, and policymakers.
We invite you to learn more about COS’s efforts and to discover how open science is evolving across many different research landscapes by registering for our newsletter. We respect your privacy—and your inbox! We won’t spam you, and we will never sell, rent, or trade your contact information. You may unsubscribe from all COS communications at any time.
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Want to know more about using OSF?
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