Over the past year, we’ve listened to open source communities around the world—learning from their challenges, growth trajectories, and the strategies that sustain them. In 2025, we’ve begun putting those learnings into practice to strengthen OSF’s open-source ecosystem. From clarifying the value of contributing to OSF to improving onboarding and community governance, we’re laying the foundation for a more inclusive, impactful contributor and developer experience for advancing open scholarship.
The OSF (Open Science Framework) is an open-source platform that enables researchers to plan, manage, share, and collaborate on their scientific projects throughout the entire research lifecycle. In collaboration with the National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, we’re excited to be working with so many new partners and preparing for diverse contributions to COS technologies. As part of our POSE community launch, these are some of the most interesting and impactful lessons that we’ve absorbed and integrated into our new efforts.
The Challenge:
Developers—especially early-career or external ones—often ask, "Why should I spend time here?" Without a clear value proposition, it’s difficult for individuals or organizations to see how contributing to our project aligns with their goals. For researchers, the connection between open-source development and research efficiency may be unclear. For businesses, the long-term value of integrations may be overshadowed by short-term development costs.
We’ve started showcasing the value of contributing to OSF not just in terms of technical prestige, but in real-world impact: improving researchers’ daily workflows, advancing open science, and expanding tool reach to a global audience
What We’re Doing:
The Challenge:
Developers won’t contribute if they can’t figure out how. Poor onboarding—unclear instructions, outdated documentation, or lack of starter tasks—often leads to frustration and drop-off. This is especially critical for those unfamiliar with the OSF’s codebase, tools, and the research context in which we operate.
By lowering the entry barrier—through webinars, structured onboarding, and updated documentation—we’re making it easier than ever for contributors to jump in and start coding!
What We’re Doing:
The Challenge:
Even technically strong projects can fail if the community feels unstructured or unwelcoming. Without clear governance, consistent engagement, and a sense of belonging, contributors lose trust. Inclusive culture and clarity of roles are essential for long-term participation and collaboration.
We know community is more than code—it’s about trust, shared goals, and mutual respect. That’s why we’ve invested in building governance and pathways that welcome and retain diverse contributors.
What We’re Doing:
The Challenge:
Even highly motivated developers walk away when APIs don’t work as expected, documentation is unclear, or there’s no support for testing and iteration. Lack of technical infrastructure—or confidence that contributions will be maintained—can stop engagement before it starts.
We’re taking the guesswork out of integrations by investing in clean, well-documented APIs, clear contribution templates, and real-time support—so developers can build confidently and reliably.
What We’re Doing:
The Challenge:
Many open-source projects fade due to burnout, unclear funding, or lack of long-term planning. Without consistent investment in people, infrastructure, and incentives, it’s hard to retain contributors or sustain the momentum needed for a thriving ecosystem.
Sustainability isn’t just about funding—it’s about trust. By investing in community-driven development through our POSE grant and RFP model, we’re ensuring OSF’s future is shaped by the people who use and build it.
What We’re Doing:
We gather feedback from OSF users, open science advocates, and prospective software contributors through various channels, including 1:1 meetings, user support messages, public events, and member community calls. This input helps us continuously improve the platform by addressing user needs and concerns. We’re preparing to collaborate with community partners to enable new OSF features and are using your requests to prioritize these contributions. These themes include:
The COS Infrastructure Team currently maintains 14 OSF add-ons that enable users to represent citation libraries in Zotero and Mendeley and the research artifacts that are stored in the tools that they already use, like Dataverse, figshare, and OneDrive. These enable researchers to bundle study inputs and outputs without duplicating effort or materials. Some of these services have developed new features in recent years, and OSF could extend to leverage these new data management capabilities.
This theme centers around the desire for customization and flexibility through add-ons that may not be possible through built-in OSF features, or workflows that are already provided effectively by other tools. This includes collaborative writing/editing tools like OverLeaf, data visualization like Tableau, computational notebooks like JupyterHub, and lab/experiment management software like Labguru. These will allow researchers to reflect more components of their project lifecycle within a single resource.
Many users have expressed interest in improved collaboration features within OSF. These include integration with popular collaboration tools like Slack and Teams, project management tools like Asana and Trello, and features that “package” to import or export OSF content in additional ways, as well as representing features or content from other services within OSF content.
Our journey to build a better open-source ecosystem for OSF is just beginning. By proactively addressing five core challenges—clear value proposition, developer experience, community governance, technical barriers, and long-term sustainability—we're creating a more welcoming and productive environment for contributors of all backgrounds.
The feedback and integrations our community members are requesting highlight the diverse needs of the research community and the potential for OSF to serve as a central hub in the open science landscape. We invite you to be part of this effort, whether you're a developer looking to contribute code, a researcher with ideas for new features, or an institution seeking to invest in open science infrastructure.
Join us in making research infrastructure more efficient, collaborative, and transparent. Visit our GitHub community space to learn more about how you can get involved and help shape the future of open science. If you are interested in applying for a grant to contribute to a project in our budding open source community, please see our request for proposals here: cos.io/pose
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COS has earned top recognition from Charity Navigator and Candid (formerly GuideStar) for our financial transparency and accountability to our mission. COS and the OSF were also awarded SOC2 accreditation in 2023 after an independent assessment of our security and procedures by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA).
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