Promoting open practices within research communities is crucial for the advancement of scientific knowledge and the efficient dissemination of research findings. As of early 2023, 48 OSF Institutions members are accelerating open scholarship and increasing the transparency of institutional research.

Advancing Research Quality and Transparency

EUR’s partnership with COS allows EUR academics to responsibly share their output using a user-friendly platform that connects with other popular tools. By lowering technical barriers, EUR academics share more frequently, gain visibility amongst their peers in the process, and contribute to normalizing openness and transparency in all disciplines.

Antonio Schettino
Senior Advisor Open Science
Erasmus Research Services

Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) has taken a proactive stance in promoting open practices among its researchers. In 2022, EUR became an OSF Institutions member to increase the visibility of EUR researchers who use the OSF to share their research and educational outputs, so that they can advance transparency and improve rigor.

The OSF Institutions infrastructure helps institutions improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their research processes, connecting all aspects of the research lifecycle to reveal insights into research investment beyond citations.

“Open and responsible scholarship practices increase the transparency, quality, and visibility of research and educational academic outputs,” said Schettino. “They are essential to ensure a trustworthy, mutual collaboration with all members of society, which is a very important goal for EUR.”

Enabling Interoperability

It is fair to say that OSF has facilitated the adoption of more open practices and communication.

Neil Jefferies
Head of innovation, Open Scholarship Support, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is also committed to promoting open practices among its researchers, with the aim of enhancing transparency, quality, and visibility of research outputs. Since becoming an OSF Institutions member in early 2022, the partnership has accelerated scholarly communication and the adoption of open practices.

The OSF Institutions infrastructure improves workflows and efficiency of institutional members by allowing the integration of OSF with institutional identity management systems. Through a collaboration with Oxford, OSF was updated to retrieve university-verified affiliation details from users' ORCID profiles. This seamless mechanism enables OSF users who were not yet part of the institution's membership to gain affiliation within OSF. A substantial benefit of an open, community infrastructure is that feature enhancements made for one can benefit all. This feature is now available to all OSF Institutions members.

“Our experience has been that OSF has been a very resource-efficient exercise from the viewpoint of central support,” said Jefferies. “Advocacy, expertise, and demand in the scholarly community has driven adoption from the outset.”