Advancing Open Science Through Open Source Development

Scholarship advances best when knowledge, tools, and data are shared as public goods. Just as societies invest in roads, power grids, and internet infrastructure for the benefit of all, research communities need durable, open infrastructure to support discovery. Open source provides that foundation by ensuring that research systems are transparent, adaptable, and built for the long term.

That’s the vision for our Open Source Ecosystem (OSE): making the Open Science Framework (OSF) a truly community-driven, sustainable platform that enables lifecycle open science with communities. By opening OSF development and governance to its stakeholders, we create shared investment in the tools that enable open scholarship for collective benefit. This shared commitment strengthens transparency, efficiency, and rigor in research, while broadening participation and improving efficiency across the research community.

In 2023, the Center for Open Science (COS) received an award from the National Science Foundation’s Pathways to Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program to accelerate this vision. The award enabled COS to support projects that extend OSF’s capabilities and foster community-driven development, while also laying the groundwork for a more durable, distributed open source ecosystem.

In 2023, the Center for Open Science (COS) received an award from the National Science Foundation’s Pathways to Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program to accelerate this vision. The award enabled COS to support projects that extend OSF’s capabilities and foster community-driven development, while also laying the groundwork for a more durable, distributed open source ecosystem.

Creating a Community-Driven Open Source Ecosystem

The OSE aims to strengthen the open-source foundations that make open science possible. Robust tools are essential to support researchers in openly collaborating, sharing, discovering, and reusing research outputs. COS has built and maintained the OSF, a free, open-source platform that helps researchers manage projects and practice open science.

Since its launch in 2012, nearly all OSF development has been led by COS staff, but we believe that establishing an open source ecosystem with community involvement is critical to the platform’s long-term sustainability and innovation. When communities are invited into the development and governance of infrastructure, they subsequently feel greater investment in its security, interoperabilty, and sustainability.

The POSE award funding helped accelerate a collaborative open source movement around OSF, supporting community-driven development and encouraging the growth of open scholarship practices.

The initiative aims to:

Connect digital storage locations, tools, and services across the research lifecycle.

Improve workflows that support open scholarship across diverse research goals, methods, and outputs.

Create clear pathways for communities to participate in developing tools that enable open scholarship, minimizing barriers to participation.

Driving Open Science Through Community Innovation

To bring these goals to fruition, the OSE supports and collaborates with a variety of projects that extend OSF’s capabilities and strengthen open science practices.

Collectively, these projects demonstrate how community-driven development can enhance research transparency, interoperability, and collaboration, helping to build a more robust, sustainable, and engaged open source ecosystem.

Accessible Content Optimization for Research Needs (ACORN)

A command-line multitool that standardizes and automates research activity data to improve accessibility, usability, and portfolio analysis for research communities.

Exporting OSF Projects to PDF

A tool that enables users to quickly export OSF projects into PDF format, supporting transparency and ease of sharing research materials.

GakuNin Research Data Management (RDM)

A national-scale research data management service in Japan that builds on the OSF’s architecture, leveraging its features and framework to advance open science infrastructure, extend OSF’s capabilities, and support growing open research momentum.

DataPipe

A tool that connects browser-based behavioral experiments directly to OSF, allowing data to be automatically saved in real time for born-open data collection.

Get Involved

Building a community-driven open source ecosystem around the OSF depends on participation from researchers, developers, and institutions across the research community. There are several ways to get involved:

Individuals interested in contributing: Fill out our interest form to share your background and learn about upcoming opportunities to participate in the OSE.

Explore the COS open-source community on GitHub. This repository includes documentation, guidelines, workflows, and resources to help new and returning contributors work together in support of open science and reproducible research.

Groups with the capacity to self-fund contributions: If you are already developing open source tools, workflows, or integrations, you can join the OSE community directly. Reach out to Daniel Steger, Technical Community Manager, to start a conversation about joining the group.

Help COS sustain and expand this collaborative open source ecosystem by making a donation.