OSF
Verified working Jul 31, 2026
A research workspace for sharing studies, data, and preregistrations.
OSF is an online platform from the Center for Open Science for organizing research projects, collaborating with teams, and making materials publicly available. Researchers can use it to manage files, document workflows, create time-stamped registrations, and connect project outputs such as datasets, papers, and preprints.
Why it stands out
- Combines private project management with public scholarly sharing in the same workspace.
- Registration workflows support transparent, time-stamped research plans.
- Built around research objects rather than just standalone files, making it easier to connect data, methods, papers, and contributors.
- Widely used in open science communities and backed by a nonprofit research infrastructure organization.
Good to know
- Creating or managing projects requires an account, even though public materials can be viewed without one.
- It is designed for scholarly research workflows, so it may feel heavier than a general-purpose file-sharing tool.
- The usefulness of public projects depends on how well individual researchers document and license their materials.
- Storage limits, file-size limits, or institutional policies may affect very large datasets.
Under the radar: Use an OSF Registration when you need a fixed, citable snapshot of a study plan; regular OSF project pages remain editable and serve a different purpose.
Photos
Researchers and lab teams use OSF to coordinate study materials, data, and documentation across a project lifecycle. Register a study plan before data collection or analysis. Share supplemental files, code, protocols, or datasets alongside a publication. Maintain a public project page that links related outputs in one place. Collaborate privately before making selected components public.
Project workspaces with files, wikis, contributors, permissions, version history, registrations, public project pages, storage integrations, citation metadata, and support for sharing research materials and outputs.
Technical Notes
- OSF provides a public REST API at api.osf.io/v2 for accessing projects, files, users, registrations, and related metadata.
- Public records can be queried without user credentials; private or write access requires authentication.
- API responses use structured JSON and are documented for programmatic integration.
Alternative listings
Open access to millions of STEM preprints before journal publication.
Open Data & Research PortalsarXiv is a long-running open archive for scholarly articles, especially preprints, across physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, electrical engineering, systems science, and economics. Users can search or browse by subject area and access papers without a paywall, but arXiv itself does not peer review the material it hosts.
0 votesVisit siteAn open preprint repository for early social science research.
Open Data & Research PortalsSocArXiv is a preprint service hosted on OSF for sharing working papers and other social science research before formal journal publication. It helps researchers make manuscripts discoverable, citeable, and accessible while keeping them connected to the broader OSF research infrastructure.
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Similar sites elsewhere
- Zenodo — zenodo.org
- Figshare — figshare.com
- Dataverse — dataverse.org
- Dryad — datadryad.org
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