On Wednesday, April 16th, we held our bi-annual Member Meeting for OSF Institutions Members. The meeting is a chance for staff at the Center for Open Science (COS) to update the membership on new OSF features, events, and other opportunities. Previously called a “Town Hall” we retained time for questions and discussion from members, but changed the format to a more straightforward meeting.
The video and slides from the event are available now.
Lots of content was discussed, but a summary is below with links to relevant resources.
Since the last Member Meeting in October 2024, we've made two big releases specifically for the OSFI membership and posted a few more helpful resources in our Institutional Help Guides.
The OSFI Metrics Dashboard was released in January 2025. We hope that everyone has had a chance to check it out. This is just the first release of this feature and we have already released the first update in March: Messaging and Collaboration features. The guide to the dashboard has been updated and there is a new demo video available. We also delivered a talk at the RDAP summit about the dashboard.
These new features allow you to directly contact users through OSF, and also to request the ability to be added as a curator to their collection -- a new role that we've created that gives you all the same rights that a read/write or an admin user would have, but specifically lists you as a curator. This update will not be the last (see below for another update planned for later this year) so please keep letting us know how we can help you meet your goals.
The Metrics Dashboard is set up to display departmental information for users in addition to their OSF activity. We obtain this data from the response we receive from your institution’s server when a user signs in through the institution. Some coordination is needed for this, because not every institution supplies this by default or supplies the same kind of information. But once we can find the information it is easy to implement. A new page on the Institutional Help Guides (and a previous blog post) outline the process in more detail. If you would like to get started, please contact us.
We've also created a new help guide page to request OSF "swag" promotional materials and download promotional flyers and handouts. We always have stickers and pens and usually some flyers or brochures you can request to have sent to you for your future events. Just fill out the form on the page and we'll get back to you ASAP.
There's lots of development in progress on the OSF platform, but we used some meeting time to review a few in particular.
Provider notifications: The next update planned for the Metrics dashboard will be a service to notify you when new material affiliated with your institution is made public. You will be able to choose the frequency of notifications (including none) from your Metrics Dashboard.
Boolean Search: Our search API update in 2023 resulted in some decisions made to increase response speed and comprehensiveness. Unfortunately, those decisions also resulted in the loss of boolean search functions in both the API and the OSF Search page. We will be restoring these search options, recognized through symbols (so words like “AND” and “OR” will still not be recognized, but the ability to do sophisticated searching is possible using +,-,|,"", (), etc.).
Verified links: The first step in updating our infrastructure for creating add-on services to OSF will be a new feature called "Linked Services." This will allow users to create an authenticated connection to objects another repository and to be able to indicate the type of item with a metadata label.
Affiliation Prompting: The goal of the affiliation prompting feature will be to ensure that your user lists are accurate and complete. The first step will be to prompt users logging into OSF who have an email address within your organization's domain, but who have not gone through the institutional login, to do so. This is intended to increase the number of users affiliating with your institution. Part two will then force users to authenticate through the institutional service at least once every 6 months, ensuring that users who are no longer affiliated are removed from user lists (but their content will remain affiliated).
UI revamp: The biggest update planned for 2025 is a full UI refresh for OSF. We shared mockups of many pages of the new look for OSF during the meeting. We also invite institutional members to attend a focus group with us to provide more feedback. We would love to hear your thoughts!
Please join us!
We quickly reviewed the activities of some of our working and interest groups. We remain extremely grateful to our Technology Advisory Working Group for their time and feedback. They contributed greatly to many of the recent releases and future updates described above. Our EU/UK Interest Group is continuing to meet quarterly to have an informal discussion on a number of topics. We are planning on convening a small research group to work on a white paper or other project about the relationship between open science and libraries. More info to come soon.
We continue to develop programming geared to our Institutional membership and research support staff in general. We hope to announce some new webinars very soon.
In addition to webinars, OSF continues to host live training events monthly and host a library of past recordings.
COS Staff will also hit the road at a number of conferences this summer. Stop by and say hi at our tables at IASSIST, Open Repositories, and ALA.
Lifecycle Journal: check out our new Lifecycle Journal project, which aims to create a new model for scholarly research sharing across the research lifecycle.
International Partnerships: COS has recently entered into agreements with the African Reproducibility Network (AREN) and the National Institute for Informatics (NII) in Japan. Check out the NII partnership announcement, and watch the COS blog to learn more about the AREN partnership.
Global Flourishing Study: The Global Flourishing Study is releasing its second wave of data, available to researchers via an OSF registration. This longitudinal study of more than 200,000 respondents has already received more than 200 registrations for the first wave of data.
RWJF Funding: OSF has just received an award for an 18-month project to coordinate efforts about data preservation, accessibility, and usability.
COS 2024 Impact Report: Check out our 2024 Impact Report for a review of the past year and highlights from some of our member network.
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