Open Workflow Management

As we learned in What is an Open Workflow?, a workflow can include many different tools and application across the lifespan of the research project. For example, if we review the OSF Research Life Cycle image (below) we can see that one research project could include the use of Zotero, DMP Tools, Evernote, GitHub, Zenodo, and more depending on the stages of the project.

Workflow managers, like OSF, can help to manage and organize various tools, content and documentation during the lifecycle of the project in one place, as well as allow you to publicly share the material in a meaningful way. Sharing all the elements of the research project in one location with persistent identifiers (e.g., Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)) provides the opportunity for yourself and other researchers to engage in open workflows while supporting the scientific ideal of reproducible results.

  OSF Research Life Cycle from NYU Libraries CC BY NC 4.0

OSF

OSF, formerly known as the Open Science Framework, is a free workflow management application that provides a central landing place for project components, regardless of digital format or owner. OSF provides a central place to bring together collaborators, project files, and to track versions of things.

Benefits of OSF

  • Version control across the whole project
  • Server locations in multiple countries, including Canada
  • Ability to create a new structure or clone an existing project
  • Sustainable access to your project (read-only at least) guaranteed for the next fifty years 
  • Ability to easily add collaborators outside of your institution
  • Digital Object Identifier (DOI) creation at the project level
  • Ability to “pre-register” a project, which essentially takes a snapshot of a project details and provides useful information for other researchers who may be interested in building on the work in the future

Considerations when using OSF

While OSF can be a one-stop-shop while working on a project, it should not be the only final location for data and other project artifacts. Final outputs should live in a data repository and in some cases datasets may need to be linked to OSF from an external resource. There are also a few potential risks when using the tool, which include:

  • All information is public, it requires the user to make decisions on what is appropriate to share (e.g., sensitive participant information, preregistration details)
  • Server locations defaulting to the United States which may not appropriate depending on your dataset
  • Uncertain longevity if the funding model changes (currently guaranteed for 50 years)

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