Enhancing Discoverability: Recent Updates to the OSF

Lifecycle Open Science (LOS) is an approach to research that promotes transparency, openness, and accessibility across the entire research lifecycle—from planning and data collection through analysis, publication, and reuse—by making research outputs and processes more interoperable, machine-readable, and actionable across systems.

In the context of the OSF, this means strengthening the underlying infrastructure that supports how research is organized, connected, and shared.

A key component of LOS is improved discoverability, which enables research outputs to be consistently interpreted and connected across tools and platforms. This requires machine-readable metadata, standardized structure, and persistent identifiers that allow research outputs to be reliably found, understood, and linked. Strengthening these foundations supports reuse across contexts by helping researchers find and build on prior work, enabling institutions to track and support outputs, and improving interoperability across research infrastructure.

FAIR Signposting

Behind the scenes, COS engineers have implemented FAIR Signposting on the OSF. Landing pages on research platforms are designed for human readers, not for the machine agents that navigate the scholarly web—making it difficult for those agents to reliably distinguish, for example, which links lead to content and which lead to metadata.

Signposting helps make content on the OSF easier for systems and tools to understand and connect by providing key information in a consistent, structured way. This includes where a research object lives, how to reliably identify it, what its main details are, and who created it. This supports all four FAIR principles—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable—by improving how OSF content can be discovered and used across the research ecosystem, including by the tools and services that help navigate and connect scholarly work.

Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs for Funders

The OSF has transitioned to the use of Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs for identifying funders associated with content on the platform. ROR is an open registry of identifiers for over 116,000 research organizations worldwide, and its adoption on the OSF means researchers will be able to link their work to a much broader range of funding organizations than was previously possible.

This transition aligns the mission of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI)—a collaboration among seven generalist repositories including OSF—to establish consistent discoverability capabilities across generalist repositories, as well as Crossref’s announcement of a long-term plan to end support for its Open Funder Registry in favor of ROR.

Existing Crossref Open Funder Registry information on the OSF has been automatically transitioned to the associated ROR ID. Using a single organizational registry enables more consistency within metadata, enhancing discoverability and reuse of content. Any research organization can request a ROR identifier using their request form.

Add a funder to your content on the OSF

COUNTER Metrics via Make Data Count

The research data landscape changes quickly, with more objects and more sources every year. This presents exciting opportunities for discovery and demonstrations of open scholarship, but can be complicated by a lack of standardization across diverse research infrastructures.

The OSF has enabled analytics on projects, registrations, preprints, and files via the OSF user interfaces and open APIs. With the adoption of the COUNTER standard for research data usage metrics through Make Data Count, institutions, funders, and other stakeholders can now access those metrics in a standardized format that is also used by many other repositories.

Make Data Count is an open initiative that aims to standardize usage metrics for research data, including how views, downloads, and citations are measured and reported. This addresses long-standing challenges: earlier, data usage across repositories was often tracked inconsistently or not at all, making comparisons or impact assessment difficult.

Users don't need to do anything to have their metrics recorded; the standardized reports are generated automatically and are available via the OSF user interface and open APIs. Monthly reports are available here, and documentation supporting the fetching and filtering of metrics is available from Datacite.

Authenticated ORCID iDs

ORCID iDs are the key persistent identifier for researchers, helping connect individual researchers reliably with their work, affiliations, funding, and other scholarly activities across systems. Because names can change or be shared by multiple people, ORCID iDs provide a consistent way to ensure that researchers receive accurate credit for their contributions.

The OSF now collects only authenticated ORCID iDs, which requires users to sign into their ORCID record and grant OSF permission to retrieve record information. This improves the trustworthiness of OSF metadata by confirming that each iD was connected by the account holder—which helps reduce errors, supports better attribution, and strengthens connections between OSF content and broader research infrastructure.

Researchers who connect their ORCID iD can also enable automatic syncing with Datacite and Crossref, so that all public OSF content with DOIs is automatically added to their ORCID record.

If you haven't yet connected your ORCID iD to your OSF account, you can do so by signing into OSF with your ORCID credentials or connecting via your OSF user settings.

Together, these updates strengthen the OSF’s role in the broader scholarly ecosystem, supporting researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, and infrastructure partners who rely on open, connected research infrastructure. By making OSF content easier to find, interpret, connect, measure, and reuse, COS is helping ensure that open research can move more effectively across the systems and communities that use it.