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Open Science Framework
Daniel van Strien

Overview of the Open Science Framework

The Open Science Framework is a project of the Centre for Open Science with funding from a wide range of funders. The Open Science Framework aims to make Open Science easier for researchers by providing a platform for hosting, documentation, data, notebooks and linking to a range of other tools.

The Open Science Framework is a flexible tool which can be used across the whole research process or only for a single component of a project.

Sign-up to the Open Science Framework

It is quick and free to create an account with the Open Science Framework.

ORCID ID

Login

  • If you a ORCID ID then you can use this to login to the open science framework.

Getting Started

The following steps will help you get started using an open notebook to practice more open research. The steps below will also outline some important components of digital scholarship that a notebook can help you achieve.

Explore existing notebooks

Exploring existing projects on the Open Science Framework may help to get a better idea of how the Open Science Framework can be used to make research more open. These suggested come from a range of disciplines and have used the Open Science Framework in different ways.

  • This project uses OSF to share underlying data and scripts for a published paper: Morís, Joaquín, Itxaso Barberia, Miguel A Vadillo, Ainhoa A Andrades, and Francisco J López. 2016. “Data and Scripts for ‘Slower Reacquisition after Partial Extinction in Human Contingency Learning.’” Open Science Framework. July 12. https://osf.io/thrc6

  • This project shares data for a forthcoming paper: Read, Cassia F, Chiu Y C Ho, Matt D White, David H Duncan, and Peter A Vesk. 2017. “BRT Model Building (training) Data Set.” Open Science Framework. May 3. https://osf.io/jndyv

  • Kardas, Michael, Juliana Schroeder, and Nicholas Epley. 2017. “Humanizing Voice, Political Beliefs.” Open Science Framework. September 29. osf.io/nm8vf.

  • IJzerman, Hans, Siegwart Lindenberg, İlker Dalğar, Michal Parzuchowski, Rodrigo Brito, Claudia Simao, Charles R Ebersole, et al. 2016. “The Human Penguin Project.” Open Science Framework. October 6. https://osf.io/2rm5b

  • Amon, Hanna, Molly Sterlacci, Åse Innes-Ker, and Anna, Ph.D. Kemdal Pho. 2015. “Do Swedish and American Subjects Exhibit Differences in Well-Being, Life Satisfaction and Emotion Regulation?” Open Science Framework. October 29. https://osf.io/d6rks

Setting up your own notebook

The following steps will help you setup an open notebook. Many of the considerations you can make when forming an Open Notebook using the Open Science Framework will be similar to those you make when publishing open access, sharing data in a repository and sharing code and methods.

Decide on a project

You may find it useful to use a current or recent project as a way of thinking about how you would use an Open Notebook to make your research process more open and reproducible.

Notebooks can be organized in different ways depending on the type of research you carry out, what you want to use a notebook for and whether the notebook will be collaborative or not. As a starting point to making research more open it might be easier to start with a particular project in mind. The Open Science Framework is usually organized at a project level although this can include multiple components or collate other projects. This will be useful if you are working on a bigger project which involves different components or stages.

Private or public?

  • The Open Science Framework allows you to choose whether to make your project (or components) of a project public. One of reservations people may have about open science and/or open notebooks is making available materials which they feel are not ready for public consumption. You could decide to make a 'hypothetical' notebook either for a made up project, or a real project, and keep it private until you are more comfortable with sharing.

  • Although you can make a OSF notebook private you should not use it as a place to store personal or sensitive data. If you are working with private or sensitive data you may still be able to use open notebooks for parts of your project which are non-sensitive.

License your project

If you decide that you will make your notebook public, or you later decide to make it public, then it is important that it includes a license. A license will help ensure other people know under what terms they can use your work.

You can assign a standard license to your open notebook or upload a custom license. Most of the time it is preferable to use a standard license rather than develop a custom one. If your notebook is part of a funded research project then your funder may encourage (or require) a particular license.

Sometimes you may want to use different licenses for different parts of your project for example:

  • for software/code you may use an MIT license
  • for raw data you might use CC0
  • for Documentation, wikis, and other outputs: CC-BY

Further guidance on licensing

Collaboration

The Open Science Framework can help facilitate collaboration both within a project team and with external collaborators. The Open Science Framework allows different types of contributors to be added to a project:

  • Administrators - can add and remove members to a project
  • read + write - can add new materials and edit existing materials
  • read - can only view existing materials

In addition to this you can also specify whether someone is a bibliographic or non-bibliographic contributor. A non-bibliographic contributor can read or write to a project but won't be included in the contributor list or in citations.

Forking an existing notebook

The Open Science Framework allows you to fork public projects. 'Forking' a project will make a copy of the public materials from that project which you can then modify or use as a template for your own project.

You may find a 'template' project which have been created to help researchers use the Open Science Framework for particular use cases or be able to fork an project which is similar to yours:

Even if you don't use these template projects they may help you think about effective ways of presenting information to other people.

Creating a new project

Organization of an Open Science Framework project

The Open Science Framework provides a fairly flexible platform so there are different ways you could organize a project. Some projects will only have a one or two files, whilst others will have numerous different components. Regardless of the scope of your project considering the issues below will help make your project more open:

Components

Projects on a the Open Science Framework are organized around different components. These components can include software, code, documentation and other files associated with your project.

There is no correct way to organize these components but it often useful to split them in ways which will be understood by someone outside of your project. Exploring other projects on the Open Science Framework may also give you ideas about the best ways to organize different components of a project.

File naming and organization

However you decide to organize different components of your project it is important that you organize your files and folders in a logical way.

There are a number of ways you can make file names more useful:

  • Choose machine readable names: don't use spaces, punctuation or special characters.
  • Choose human readable names: try and use names that are meaningful and non-ambiguous. Try and choose a name that could be understood by someone looking at your project without further explanation.

You can find more guidance on best practices for file naming at: http://help.osf.io/m/bestpractices/l/609932-file-naming

To organize your files effectively:

  • use clear names and locations for folders
  • aim to maintain a consistent approach to organization throughout your research process
  • separate raw data from derived data
  • Make README files: this allows you to document what is included in each folder. Update this when you make changes.

You can find more guidance on organizing files here: http://help.osf.io/m/bestpractices/l/611391-organizing-files

Collating outputs - add-ons

A useful feature of the Open Science Framework is that it will integrate with different 'add-ons'. This makes it a useful tool for collating different outputs from a project whilst allowing people to use existing tools. These add-ons include a number of cloud storage providers, Figshare, and Mendeley and Zotero citation managers.

Documentation

Good documentation is a central component of open research. Even if you do not intend to use open notebooks in the future good documentation can be valuable for a project and for the sharing of code and data associated with a publication.

Examples of good documentation

Existing examples of good practice can be useful for helping to decide what information should be included in documentation

READMEs

A README is often distributed with software, code or a dataset(s). A good README will provide information necessary for users to understand how to use the outputs you are sharing.

A README may provide information on instruments used, the types of experiments carried out to produce a given dataset, dependencies for software or particular considerations around how a dataset should be interpreted and analyzed. A README can also be a useful document within a team and help new team members understand how previous work was done. Equally it can be an efficient way of documenting a project at a 'lower level'.

Persistent identifiers

Persistent identifiers provide a stable way of referencing your research. Project with the Open Science Framework are assigned a DOI. You can find further guidance on using DOIs here.

Version control

The Open Science Framework provides some support for versioning of files and documentation. When a new version of a document is uploaded with the same name a new version will be created. You will be able to view changes to a file and download previous versions of a document. You can view more information on version control here: http://help.osf.io/m/files/l/524182-file-revisions-and-version-control.

Further Resources on using the Open Science Framework

  • The Open Science Framework provides documentation, support and FAQs here

  • The Open Science Framework has regular webinars. The OSF mailing list will advertise upcoming webinars.

Other approaches to Open Notebook Research

The Open Science Framework provides a useful tool for doing open notebook research without too much additional set up but there are other approaches you could explore.

  • A 'wiki' based approach which primarily collects notes gathered from visits to archives and engagements with other primary and secondary materials: http://wiki.wcaleb.rice.edu/

  • GitHub Pages provide an easy way of building a version controlled website. This tutorial outlines how to setup a GitHub pages website. This approach could be adapted to use on a narrative based open notebook.

Open book drafts

These examples demonstrate the potential use of open notebook approaches for books and textbooks.

Further resources:

You can find further resources on Open Science/Research and related topics here