Scientific Data Adds the Open Science Framework to Its List of Recommended Repositories

Nov. 14, 2016

November 14, 2016 | Charlottesville, VA

We are pleased to announce that the Center for Open Science’s (COS) signature software tool, the Open Science Framework (OSF, https://osf/io), has been added to Scientific Data’s list of recommended generalist repositories.

Since their launch in 2014, Scientific Data, a division of Nature, has published descriptions of datasets archived at more than 45 different repositories. This diversity is a key part of the Scientific Data philosophy, which is to support data repositories that meet the criteria of their strong policies on data preservation and openness. Scientific Data maintains a regularly updated list of recommended open data repositories, which is also used more widely by the Nature Research journals and their publisher Springer Nature.

Along with OSF, Scientific Data added two other generalist repositories to their recommended repository list – Harvard Dataverse and Zenodo, along with continued recommendations for figshare and Dryad, two generalist repositories that have been very popular with their authors. Generalist repositories like OSF serve an important function in communities without centralized, specialist data storage capabilities. More than half of Scientific Data’s authors use a generalist repository to store some or all of their data, and a lack of obvious data repositories continues to be a perceived barrier to data sharing.

“This is exactly what the OSF was built to enable,” said Matt Spitzer, Community Manager for COS. “Researchers, readers, funders and others will benefit by having articles directly connected to where research data and materials have been stored and curated - eliminating the need to jump through additional hurdles to share them. It’s the essence of openness.”

About Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology startup founded in 2013 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. The Open Science Framework (OSF), COS’s flagship product, is a web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use the OSF to connect services, collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

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