OSF, formerly known as the Open Science Framework, is a workflow management web application that provides a central landing place for project components that may be scattered across many different digital workspaces and might be owned by different people. OSF provides a central place to bring together collaborators, project files, and to track versions of things.
For this activity, you will learn about OSF and engage in a few activities to become familiar with the tool. Choose from one of two activities to complete:
- Watch the video “Getting Started With the Open Science Framework.”
- Review the UBC OSF Workshop Documents to learn about creating an account and adding to a project.
For Example
See just what you can connect to OSF in this sample project using a mock research project.
Complete this Activity
To complete this activity, create a UBC-affiliated OSF Institutions account using your CWL credentials, or a generic account if you’re with another institution. Explore the functionality and add some content.
Share a link to your published OSF project in the comments below and/or reflect on how you could use the platform for your teaching and/or research.
Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Open Science by kholmber. (Pixabay License)
My commitment to myself coming out of this module is to use OSF for my next research project! I think it’s a really useful looking tool and I figured out that I could connect it with my existing Dropbox account for even more storage redundancy. It’s also great that I can login via my ORCID (I’m not affiliated with UBC). So far I just set up a skeleton page but I’m excited to explore some more. I’ve found really valuable projects that intersect closely with my areas of research and practice on OSF before (via topic searches in Google etc) so one thing that I think is a really neat possibility for OSF is getting connected with other researchers/practitioners interested in your topic while you’re still doing the research.
The OSF open project management site is truly wonderful. I’ve been looking for some way to share my search rather than going through the traditional non open routes. Thank you for introducing this site! Later today I’m meeting with some instructors to discuss our next project which is on OER resources. I’ve made a skeleton project file to introduce them to the site, and start working on developing the research project. Here is the link to this new OER project. https://osf.io/7kyta/.
As Christine mentions above, I also think of the advantages of connecting with other researchers interested in the topic while the research is ongoing. I’m very glad I picked this topic to investigate, and hope readers in the future will check out the link to see the progress.
OK, I was feeling a bit daunted by the idea of using OSF but it seems to be fairly user-friendly. I was able to create an account and make a test project. I’m excited to see how this software will help manage my research projects especially since I’m prone to having them be a bit messy and disorganised. I think that having a framework for how to sort all my data and analysis will be very helpful and in the long run will make my research run more smoothly, something that I definitely need after going through this unit.
I was really excited to learn how to use OSF. Though I have not conducted any large projects that require this type of structure yet, I was able to see how I could use it to manage the components of research projects in the type of scholarly communications or research data management roles that I am searching for. I really appreciated that you could choose where to store your data, which aligns with grant requirements and Tri-Agency policy. As Christine mentions above, I also think that a wonderful possibility for OSF is getting connected with researchers and practitioners interested in your topic. One question I have about OSF is this: if your files are linked to your UBC CWL or another institutional login, can you change ownership of those files to your ORCID?
This is such a great tool for collaborating. I’m wondering if journals use this type of feature as well in assisting with the review and revision of documents? My other question would be whether this feature has the ability to hide some data (e.g. identifiers) to protect privacy. I have created a url and it looks really easy to use and share: https://osf.io/cbszq/
I am so happy to start exploring OSF! This is my Ph.D. project: https://osf.io/vu45y/