As 2025 comes to a close, it’s an opportune moment to reflect on how far the OSF Open Science Ecosystem (OSE) initiative has come, celebrate what we accomplished this year, and look ahead to the opportunities in 2026 and beyond.
Where We Started
When we launched the OSE initiative with support from the National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, we began by immersing ourselves in conversations with open source communities around the world—learning from their challenges, growth trajectories, and the strategies that sustain them.
In 2025, we began putting our learnings into practice to strengthen OSF’s open source ecosystem. From clarifying the value of contributing to OSF to improving onboarding and community governance, this work laid the foundation for a more inclusive and impactful contributor and developer experience for advancing open scholarship.
2025 Highlights
This year, the OSE community came together to experiment, build, and share:
Hackathon: Teams tackled real-world research infrastructure challenges, generating collaborative open-source solutions to advance open science across the research lifecycle.
OSE Project Spotlights: Community-driven projects extended OSF’s capabilities and demonstrated the power of open-source collaboration:
Enhanced OSF Add-ons: Add-ons became a standalone service, lowering technical barriers for external teams to create integrations without direct involvement from COS developers. Learn more.
Linked Services: A simpler, scalable way to connect external tools to OSF. Starting with Dataverse integration, Linked Services provide authenticated connections that go beyond simple hyperlinks, giving researchers context about how external services relate to their projects. Learn more.
Open Source Community Infrastructure: Our GitHub community space now includes documentation, contribution guidelines, and ongoing opportunities for engagement. Weekly office hours provide real-time support for developers building on the platform.
Looking Ahead: 2026 Focus Areas
In 2026, OSE will focus on two strategic priorities that support the community and maximize OSF’s impact:
Linked Services – Lightweight Integrations
We will prioritize Linked Services as the main pathway for new OSF integrations. This approach enables more tools and services to connect to OSF while keeping technical overhead manageable. Ideal proposals:
Supporting API Usage
Many of OSF’s most valuable applications are built on our API—custom tools and workflows created by researchers and developers. In 2026, we aim to better understand these applications and identify ways to support them. We’re not looking to replace or overshadow community-built tools; rather, the aim is to lower friction and help ensure the API continues to offer a dependable foundation for integrations.
Get Involved in 2026
We invite you to help shape the OSE in two ways:
Building Together
The OSE initiative is about creating sustainable infrastructure for open science, shaped by the communities it serves. The progress made in 2025 shows what’s possible when researchers, developers, and institutions collaborate. We’re grateful to everyone who contributed and look forward to continuing this work together in 2026.