What is the Open Science Framework?

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a tool for simplifying the management of research projects and related activities, regardless of discipline (despite its name). It is a service provided by the Centre for Open Science, a not-for-profit organisation based in Virginia in the USA.

The OSF provides a single location where a researcher and their colleagues can discover, access and manage all the digital resources that are used a part of their research activity. Rather than duplicating existing scholarly tools and resources, OSF integrates with them and links them together, so that working with them is more convenient and efficient. It is very likely that you use one or more of these tools already. While the OSF is designed to facilitate the conduct of research in an open manner, no material need be openly accessible automatically. Openness is achieved by making it easy to collect together the diverse outputs of a modern research project, and then providing a simple means to make them available more widely when the time is right.

For example, a typical project might store data files in Microsoft OneDrive, references to source materials and bibliographies in Zotero, maintain analytical scripts using GitHub and publish preprints on Zenodo. Researchers using OSF can access all these resources under a single project heading rather than having to log in to each service separately to keep track of activity

OSF at Oxford

OSF at Oxford is a two-year Open Science Framework membership pilot which started in Spring 2022, funded by MSD and operated by the Bodleian Libraries. The pilot is aimed at establishing the demand for such a service, and assessing the associated support requirements. The service is available to all Oxford members regardless of discipline, and over 50 projects are now active on OSF Oxford.

OSF is integrated with Oxford SSO via an associated ORCID so that OSF can read your verified affiliation information, and allow you to associate projects with the University. Projects in OSF will continue to operate after the pilot regardless of the outcome of the pilot. The 2022 Festival of Open Scholarship included a session on OSF at Oxford which provides some more detail. Further information and guides will be available on the revamped Research Data Oxford pages in the coming weeks. If you have any queries about OSF, please contact Research Data Oxford enquiries at researchdata@ox.ac.uk

Getting started with OSF at Oxford

If you do not have one already, you will need to have an ORCID linked to your Oxford SSO account. Then go to the OSF Home Page and select “Sign Up” at the top right. Then choose to create your account via institution and select “University of Oxford” from the list presented. You will then be taken to ORCID (via SSO) and asked to confirm that OSF can access your details. And that’s it, you are ready to create an OSF project.

If you have an existing OSF account you should be able to update it with Oxford affiliation as follows:

Ensure that you have an ORCID associated with your account, and that you can use ORCID to sign in to OSF. Sign out from OSF and sign-in again, making sure to select sign-in via institution this time, and selecting “University of Oxford”.

Useful links

ORCID affiliation at Oxford (SSO required)

Open Science Framework registration

Marketing material for the OSF at Oxford (Slides, logos etc)