On March 13, 2025, I gave a presentation at a session of the annual RDAP Summit titled “What is ‘Curation’ in a self-mediated, open repository. A Case Study of OSF.” Many repositories that researchers rely on are open platforms, not tied to particular institutions. When valuable curation activities are tied to institutional data curators, how can the important research materials in these repositories be curated? The following is part two of a two-part summary of the talk (part one). Slides can be found at: https://osf.io/yhtns. This post will be updated if and when video from the session becomes available.
In part one of this series, I described the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform as a repository designed for independent researchers. Through the development of the OSF Institutions membership program, the Center for Open Science (COS) hoped to increase collaboration between researchers and their institutions. Through work with institutional members, COS found that addressing three issues would improve researcher/institution collaboration:
Ideas about how to address the findings above were influenced by the CURATE(D) steps for data curation, as defined by the Data Curation Network. Could there be a way to support institutions in following these steps within OSF?
All of the above are possible in OSF, but the researcher is the only one who would have access to accomplish them. Yet, since curation is rarely a specialty of researchers, these tasks rarely happen. While OSF Institutions allows for the aggregation of affiliated content, quickly assessing the needs for curation wasn’t a feature. And then if content needing curation is identified, the institution has no way to directly help.
In short, our research found that:
These two ideas were the cornerstones of the first big feature update of OSF to provide direct support to institutional administrators and research support staff.
In order to help institutions understand their researchers’ activity, we had to make a few changes to core policies and services.
We had to first update our Terms of Use (TOU). The TOU hadn’t been updated since the institutional membership was created. We included new language to formalize the definition of institutional administrators. More importantly, the TOU for OSF does not allow for the sharing of any private information about individuals, such as contact information. That hasn’t changed. But we have added to the terms that users give their consent to provide aggregated public information on their activities and limited private information on the amount of private data they have stored to their institution when affiliating.
That change set the stage for a complete overhaul of an existing institutional metrics dashboard with limited functionality. In addition to the simple list of users and counts of public content that already existed, the refreshed dashboard would provide institutional administrators with the ability to:
The dashboard would feature a summary page with key visualizations like researcher department breakdown, rate of activity, type of OSF material, use of add-ons, etc. It would also include real-time reports that could be customized and downloaded about users and the OSF content they create.
Developed in close collaboration with the Technology Advisory Working group throughout 2024, the new metrics dashboard launched in January 2025 (find out more about the dashboard in our help guide). Feedback from members has so far been positive.
With enhanced ability to see and understand usage of OSF, the need for tools to better interact and collaborate with researchers was needed to truly enable and encourage more of the CURATE(D) workflow steps and, ultimately, more FAIR data sharing on OSF.
The first step for any curation of content on OSF by institutional administrators would necessarily have to involve contact with the researcher, since they retain all administrative rights to their own content. An institutional admin is not able to make any changes unless given that permission by the researcher.
As mentioned above, however, the TOU for OSF does not allow the release of private information to anyone. This includes institutional administrators. Even though they would have access to institutional contact information outside of OSF, sharing OSF-specific information is prohibited to ensure the privacy of things like personal email addresses or social media handles that would not be in institutional directories.
Our solution was to enable the sending of messages through the institution’s metrics dashboard. Individual users can be sent a message via an interface in the dashboard. The message sent to the user comes from an OSF email address and the sender is identified as an institutional administrator, conveying the veracity of the sender’s role as an administrator. The sender can opt to have their own email listed as the reply-to and cc’d to the message as well, allowing for the communication to transition off of the OSF platform if appropriate.
Messaging gets us partway to the solution of enabling greater collaboration, but the institution is still limited in its ability to directly improve the FAIR-ness of content. When reviewing the CURATE(D) steps, we knew that there was no reason a user of OSF couldn’t follow any of them. We initially thought of creating a new permission level for institutional users of OSF that would be assigned as administrators for all institutionally affiliated content. However, the ability to make any changes to a project would still require the researcher’s opt-in.
Our solution was to create a role called “Curator." The user in that role would have the same permissions as any other contributor to the project, but would be labeled as "Curator." They are also not automatically added to the “bibliographic” contributor list that is used to create citations or shared in metadata.
Institutional admins can send a request through the metrics dashboard to be added as a Curator on a project. As with the messaging function, the request clearly indicates they are an institutional admin. The project owners can choose to add the curator or to decline the request.
Once the Curator has completed their work they can remove themselves from the project, or they can continue on to ensure access if a researcher leaves their institution. Further, the researcher who created the project and any other project admin can remove the Curator if they no longer require their assistance.
Clearly we do still have limitations in how much we can enable institutional curation of content. This method still requires active participation by the researcher – they have to pay attention, they have to consent to add the Curator. There is also no in-app tooling (e.g. pop-up or inbox on platform), we are relying on users reading email from OSF and not deleting it or losing it in spam filters.
Data is also still not deposited for institutional management in this method. OSF content continues to be owned by the individual OSF users who create it. However, we hope that this increased ability to recognize and improve research sharing practices may help in future migration of data to institutionally managed repositories
We are working on changes and enhancements to continue to improve the use of OSF by institutions and their users. The biggest impact will probably come from UI updates, planned for later this year, to encourage metadata creation and increase the uptake of affiliation, along with other workflow changes for researchers themselves. Improvements are also planned for the dashboard to include notifications to institutional administrators of new public affiliated content, as well as a log of messages sent.
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