For years, OSF has done a remarkable job of being the one-stop shop for open-science services.
Now, as the rest of the open-science ecosystem has expanded and matured, it is exciting to see OSF taking on a new role that integrates with other services and that contributes deeply to those initiatives. Our team at Stanford looks forward to continuing to work closely with the OSF team in support of discipline-specific metadata and other community-based standards that will amplify its work to enhance the sharing and reuse of experimental data and other research products.
For many years, OSF has helped to advance good practices in project management and open science across the research lifecycle.
I greatly admire that COS, at this time, took stock of where OSF is most unique and most needed and will reorient its services to focus on those roles, while collaborating and integrating with other specialized services across the research ecosystem in other areas.
At QDR, we’re looking forward to working with COS to make sure that moving from qualitative preregistration to data deposit works smoothly and that you can effectively link your preprint to your qualitative data deposit and vice versa. And if you had been planning to share qualitative data via OSF, we’d love to talk to you to see if QDR might work for you.
As the biggest consumers of academic research become agentic, existing infrastructure for open research needs to adapt.
OSF is an essential part of this and we support them fully in their focus, as a partner. Figshare looks forward to deepening our work with COS and OSF to make research workflows genuinely connected, not just co-located.
We have always valued working with OSF and welcome this new plan to work even closer. OSF's move toward interoperable infrastructure is important.
Scientists increasingly work across disciplinary boundaries with diverse data types; we need systems that connect rather than operate in silos. Considerable value comes when platforms like OSF improve their specialty while making it easy for researchers to link plans, data, and outputs across systems — reducing transaction costs and making open science practices more natural and impactful.
The rapidly changing landscape of scientific research has made it abundantly clear that science works best as a collaborative endeavor.
COS has been an invaluable partner to ICPSR and we are excited to continue working together to build a stronger and more integrated research infrastructure.
At IOI, we study the open infrastructure landscape every day, and we have learned that the most resilient organizations are the ones who are honest about what they do best.
We also know that this honesty sometimes calls for pragmatic, necessary choices rather than easy ones. We commend COS for taking on the examination of OSF's role in a community and ecosystem that have changed enormously since its founding in 2013. We look forward to seeing, and supporting, what this transition makes possible for COS and the broader community.
From the beginning of the U.S. Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) Pilot, the Center for Open Science has shared our vision of a more interconnected and transparent research ecosystem.
We're excited to see OSF continue to strengthen its focus on linking research plans, activities, outputs, and outcomes through persistent identifiers and interoperable open infrastructure. That commitment closely aligns with our goal to enable reliable connections between dynamic research activities across the research lifecycle, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration.
OSF is shaped by the communities it serves. We work with researchers to improve usability, reduce barriers to adopting lifecycle open science, and ensure the platform reflects real-world research practices.
OSF supports research communities in developing workflows and templates that reflect disciplinary practices. Community input helps ensure OSF remains useful, flexible, and grounded in researchers’ actual needs.
OSF is designed to work alongside other trusted open infrastructure. Rather than replacing specialized repositories and services, OSF helps connect research activities, outputs, and outcomes across platforms.
The Workflow Launcher is a new dashboard-level feature on the OSF that provides a centralized entry point for starting core research workflows. Its primary purpose is to make it easier for users to initiate registrations and preprints from a single, lifecycle-oriented surface, rather than navigating to separate pages to begin each workflow.
This feature is intended to act as an early-stage intervention in the research lifecycle, guiding users toward structured open science practices at the point of initiation. By bringing core research workflows together in one place, it makes it easier for researchers to begin transparent, lifecycle-oriented research from the start.
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