Connect and share your research with OSF – an easy, integrated platform.

OSF is a free, open-source platform for creating and linking transparent research records. OSF enables researchers to register study plans, publish preprints through community-run services, and link externally to related data, materials, code, publications, and other results.

OSF supports lifecycle open science by helping researchers openly document, connect, and share their research throughout the process.

OSF enables researchers and research communities to create a clearer, more durable record of their work by registering study plans, submitting preprints through community-run services, and linking related outputs and outcomes over time. This helps make more of the research process visible, not just the final paper.

Register study plans

Create a citable record of your research plans before a study begins. Registrations provide a clear point of reference for understanding how research developed over time

Share preprints

Research communities can use OSF to operate preprint services that reflect their scope, policies, and disciplinary norms. Researchers can use those services to share outcomes earlier and more openly.

Link work across tools and systems

Connect study plans to research outputs and outcomes stored in specialized repositories and services, helping make research easier to find, understand, and assess.

Discover connected research

Search public research records and identify connections to related data, code, materials, papers, and supplements

Create a more connected research record

OSF is evolving to work alongside the open research infrastructure that researchers already use. Future development will focus on making it easier to register study plans, link related outputs and outcomes across systems, and creating more complete, durable, and transparent research records.

A closer look at lifecycle open science

Lifecycle open science (LOS) makes the entire path of research—from initial study plans, to data code, analyses, and outcomes—publicly accessible, connected, and findable in a persistent, open location.

This approach makes the full path of research easier to see, assess, and build on, rather than treating the paper as the sole contribution to research. Others can better understand what was planned, what was produced, what was found, and how those pieces relate. Research becomes easier to evaluate, reuse, verify, and build on when those connections are visible.

Supporting continued access to public research

OSF is committed to the persistence of the scholarly record by ensuring that publicly shared research objects and their associated metadata remain persistent, discoverable, and accessible through sustainable strategies and persistent identifiers.

As part of this strategy, OSF backs up preservation copies of public registrations through the Internet Archive and intends to extend comparable practices to public projects and preprints. To support long-term stewardship of the public OSF content, COS maintains a fund to ensure continuity of public content should the organization need to close or curtail operations in the future.

How researchers are using the OSF

From study planning to sharing data, code, and research outcomes, researchers are using OSF to create more transparent and connected research records. Explore examples of lifecycle open science in practice.

"We wanted to clearly document our hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans before examining the data, and OSF provided a straightforward platform to do that. Making our materials publicly available also helps other researchers understand exactly how the study was conducted and potentially build on our work.

Jolana Samii, PhD

"The preregistration template on OSF was very, very helpful. It's so structured that, at the end of the day, it not only gives you credibility later on, but it also gives you a template to follow when you do the analysis.”

Rodrigo Reyes Cordova, PhD

OSF supports transparent, connected research throughout the research lifecycle.

Connect research activity and outputs

OSF helps researchers connect study plans, research outputs, and outcomes across complementary research infrastructure, creating a more transparent and durable research record.

Version control

Analysis, code, and manuscript drafts change over time, and it is important to keep track of all these different versions. OSF makes it easy by automating version control for files with the same name.

Register your work

Registrations create time stamped, read-only versions of a project. Use this to preregister a hypothesis and analysis plan, or keep a snapshot of work before peer review. Registrations can also be embargoed to stay private for a set period before becoming public.

Share your work

OSF allows you to share what you want, when you want. Everything on OSF is private by default. Users have fine-grained control over which aspects of the project are made public.

Stay connected across research tools

OSF is built for interoperability with the specialized tools and platforms that researchers already use—like Zenodo, Dryad, and Dataverse—so your data, code, and materials stay linked to your OSF study record.

Community-developed templates

OSF supports preregistration templates developed by and with research communities to help researchers document study plans in ways that reflect disciplinary practices while promoting transparency and consistency.

Hero image: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash