Charlottesville, VA – The Open Science Framework (OSF), an open-source research collaboration and management platform to enable open science practices that is developed and maintained by the Center for Open Science (COS), has reached 500,000 worldwide registered users.
“OSF creates open exchange of knowledge by connecting researchers and making it easy to document and share their work,” said Nici Pfeiffer, COS’s Chief Product Officer. “OSF enhances the entire research lifecycle by empowering communities to adopt practices that advance credible and reproducible research; and foster a culture shift toward more open and rigorous research.”
OSF meets a critical need for communities to adopt open practices across the research lifecycle. OSF makes it possible to conduct open scholarship behaviors and makes it easy to do so with efficient workflows and by integrating services that researchers use. The OSF community represents all domains of scholarship. Users have registered more than 100,000 studies and shared millions of data files and other research content. OSF supports the open scholarship research community and works with partners and federal agencies to make research more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable (FAIR).
In 2021, OSF registered users posted more than 2.6M files, translating to 7,985 files daily. Moreover, research consumers are accessing and downloading content at high rates, with over 10M unique visitors in 2021 downloading more than 51M files.
OSF’s registered users are leading by example in improving research openness, integrity, and reproducibility. Their adoption is having a viral impact, as indicated by OSF’s non-linear growth every year since it launched in November 2012. It took five years to reach the first 100,000 users, two more years to reach 200,000, and one more year to reach 400,000. Now, just seven months later, half a million researchers are using OSF.
“Ten years ago, open science was an unfamiliar concept and the only practitioners were innovators seeking to do science in a new, more rigorous, transparent, and inclusive way,” said Brian Nosek, COS’s Executive Director. “The milestone of 500,000 registered users on OSF indicates that open science is now mainstream. As the norms and reward system continue to shift toward open and reproducible research practices, COS will be prepared to continue scaling the infrastructure to support these new research practices to accelerate discovery of knowledge, treatments, and solutions.”
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About Center for Open Science:
Founded in 2013, COS is a nonprofit culture change organization with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools, including the Open Science Framework (OSF). Learn more at cos.io.
Contact: Alexis Rice
alexis@cos.io or (434) 207-2971
Web: https://cos.io/
Twitter: @OSFramework
