Research Data Management

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free and open source project management tool that connects researchers to the tools they are already using to make research management easier. It was made and maintained by the Center for Open Science, a non-profit dedicated to increasing the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research.

Some important aspects of the OSF is that it allows you to:

• Enable group collaboration while tracking contributions and controlling access
  • you can add collaborators of all levels, on different parts of your project independently
• Keep track of master copies of files as well as versions and backups
  • if you upload files of the same name, the OSF will track all the versions! There is no need to do the _v1, _v2 at the end of your file names!
• Make sure your documentation is always up-to-date with the built-in Wiki
  • you and your group (or just you!) can document your methodology, meeting minutes, standard operating procedures, lab procedures, etc.
• Still use the storage and collaboration tools that work for you all
  • Because there are so many add-ons for the OSF, you can all still use Google Drive for storage, or GitHub to collaborate on code, while linking it to one OSF project for easy discovery and documentation!

The Center for Open Science and NYU’s Data Services are excited to announce OSF for Institutions at NYU!

Researchers who rely on the Open Science Framework (OSF) to manage their project workflows, build research transparency, encourage project visibility, and collaborate with other scholars can now affiliate their projects with NYU’s institutional membership, thus joining the growing OSF community at the university while continuing to enjoy all the benefits and functionality of the framework.

NYU users can get double the maximum amount of OSF storage for no cost as a part of our membership. Simply contact support and they will be able to assist.

OSF accounts are free to everyone -- however, you can affiliate your work with NYU and connect your NYU accounts if you use the institutional login! If you already have an OSF account and would like to link it to NYU, before using the institutional login, make sure your NETID@nyu.edu e-mail address is a primary e-mail on your account. If you do not, a second account will be made for you. The two can be merged, but you will have to make a request to the Open Science Framework to do so. 

If you do not have an OSF account, then use the Sign Up button on the OSF home page (osf.io) to get to this page:

Choose 'Sign in through institution' and then select New York University and log in with Shibboleth!

OSF allows you to create a project from scratch or from a template. The links below will take you to OSF articles for each topic.

• Create a Project (experiment, lab group, paper, collaboration space)
• Add Contributors and edit their permissions
• Create a Project based on one of your current projects
• Create a Project using a public project as a template
• Connecting Add-Ons
  • Storage Add-Ons
  • Reference Management Add-Ons

You can also work with the OSF from the comfort of R or Python using special libraries created by and for researchers:

• osfr: R library to interface with the OSF
• osfclient: Python library for OSF

For all the OSF webinars, check the Center for Open Science YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGPlVf8FsQ23BehDLFrQa-g