FAQs

It's free!

OSF is maintained and developed by the Center for Open Science (COS), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. COS is supported through grants from a variety of supporters, including federal agencies, private foundations, and commercial entities. Read more about our finances.

COS established a $250,000 preservation fund for hosted data in the event that COS had to curtail or close its offices. If activated, the preservation fund will preserve and maintain read access to hosted data. This fund is sufficient for 50+ years of read access hosting at present costs. COS will incorporate growth of the preservation fund as part of its funding model as data storage scales. For information about OSF backups and technical preservation details, see the OSF Backup and Preservation Policy.

OSF integrates with the scientist's daily workflow. OSF helps document and archive study designs, materials, and data. OSF facilitates sharing of materials and data within a laboratory or across laboratories. OSF also facilitates transparency of laboratory research and provides a network design that details and credits individual contributions for all aspects of the research process. To see how it works, read our Guides.

Anyone can create an OSF account for free at osf.io. Check out our Guides for a thorough run-down of how OSF works. These FAQs will only cover a few of the most basic questions about OSF, so it’s highly recommended that you read through our OSF guides.

If you are a developer, check out the open source code for OSF on GitHub or read our API docs. For more information, send an email to contact@osf.io.

For updates on new features, you can join our Google Group, find us on Twitter and on Facebook, or follow the COS GitHub page. 

Send us an email and we'll be happy to help you.

If you experience problems using OSF or connecting to one of the third-party storage add-ons, you can check our status page for updates on how our services are operating.

OSF has taken several steps to comply with GDPR, including revising our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, ensuring GDPR compliance of third-party vendors and executing Data Processing Addendums with each, and reviewing policies and procedures for deleting user data. Read our blog post for more detail.

OSF may collect various data that you share upon registering and in using OSF and its suite of products. Please see section 7 of our Privacy Policy for this information.

You’re always welcome to deactivate or delete your account. If you’d like to delete your account and personal data, please email support@osf.io.

You’re always welcome to deactivate or delete your account. You should be aware that information that you've shared with others or that others have copied may also remain visible after you have closed your account or deleted the information from your own profile. In addition, you may not be able to access, correct, or eliminate any information about you that other users have copied or exported out of the Websites, because this information may not be in our organization's control. Your public profile may be displayed in search engine results.

You can export your project files in .zip format, one for each storage provider. You can also access all the content of your projects via the OSF's open API; documentation is available at developer.osf.io

If you cannot consent to the updated terms and privacy policy, you may export your data and close your account at any time.

Security is extremely important for OSF. When you sign up and create a password, your password is not recorded. Instead, we store a bcrypt hash of your password. This is a computation on your password that cannot be reversed but is the same every time it is computed from your password. This provides extra security. No one but you can know your password. When you click "Forgot your password," OSF sends you a new random password because it neither stores nor has the ability to compute your password.

Transfer of data to OSF Storage is encrypted with SSL (external storage add-ons may have their own policies). Data at rest is encrypted on OSF Storage. You can also use the Amazon S3 add-on and implement server-side encryption on S3.

If you would like to report a security issue, please email support@osf.io for instructions on how to report the security issue. Do not include details of the issue in that email.

OSF Storage uses Google Cloud for both active and archival storage. Files uploaded to OSF Storage are stored in various storage locations, configurable per user. We keep MD5 hashes for files and use cyclic redundancy checks to prevent and mitigate any data corruption. File backups are hosted in regional coldline buckets, and there are twice daily backup jobs performed. Please refer to Google Cloud documentation for details about the other robustness features Google Cloud provides.

The OSF database is backed up via streaming replication 24 hours a day, and incremental restore points are made twice daily. Further, the OSF database is maintained in encrypted snapshots for an additional 60 days. Database backups are verified monthly.

Operational data for other OSF services are backed up in primary cloud file storage for 60 days.

Logs are primarily stored in Google Cloud cold storage indefinitely. In certain cases a third- party aggregation service is used for up to 90 days, then backed up to Amazon S3 indefinitely.

Unfortunately, no. When a user deletes a file or project from  OSF, access to this content is removed for all users. 

OSF is designed to support both private and public workflows. You can keep projects, or individual components of projects, private so that only your project collaborators have access to them.

OSF is not HIPAA compliant. If you use a HIPAA-compliant storage provider that is available as an OSF add-on, we recommend using that service connected to your OSF project to meet your HIPAA requirements. Please refer to your institutional policies regarding specific security requirements for your research.

The Center for Open Science acts in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 USC § 512). Please refer to Section 20, “PROCEDURE FOR MAKING CLAIMS OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”, of the Terms of Use for more information.

Log in to OSF with the email address and password of the account you created, and there will be a link to resend the confirmation email.

From your "Account Settings" page, you can add additional email addresses to your account, and select which of these is your primary email address. Any of these emails can be used to log in to OSF.

Log in to the account you wish to keep and navigate to your "Account Settings" page. There, enter the email address associated with your other OSF account. You will receive a confirmation link via email. Clicking the link will merge the projects and components into one account.

From your "Account Settings" page, you can request a deactivation of your OSF account. A member of the OSF team will review your request and respond to confirm deactivation.

A folder can be used to organize files within a project or component - just like a folder on your own computer groups files together. A component is like a sub-project to help you organize different parts of your research. Components have their own privacy and sharing settings as well as their own unique, persistent identifiers for citation, and their own wiki and add-ons. You can also register a component on its own, without registering the parent project.

To apply a license to your OSF project, visit the project's "Overview" page and select one from the "License picker" in the top left of the page below the project's description. You can select from a variety of commonly used licenses or upload your own.

DOIs are available for public projects and registrations. To get a DOI, first create a project or registration. Then click the "Create DOI" link, located in the top left of the page below the project title. A DOI  will be automatically created.

Yes! Read more on the API docs

To delete a project or component, navigate to the project or component and click on Settings in the gray navigation bar. There you will see a red Delete button. If the project or component has nested components, you must delete the nested components before you can delete the parent project or component.

A globally unique identifier, or GUID, is a unique string only assigned to one object on OSF. All files, projects, registrations and users on OSF receive a GUID. Privacy settings of the project, component, or registration dictate who can see the metadata about files, projects, components, or registrations. If a file is deleted, the GUID will always resolve to a page that provides metadata about the removed file (file name, storage provider, if the deletion occurred on OSF or on an add-on service, name/GUID of user who deleted the file, and timestamp of file deletion). For projects, components, registrations and users the GUID will resolve and inform that the content has been removed. Non-deleted or withdrawn files, links, and metadata are persistent as described above.

A registration is a frozen version of your project that can never be edited or deleted, but you can issue a withdrawal of it later, leaving behind basic metadata. The project can continue to be edited and updated, providing you the option to register your project at different points throughout the research cycle.

When you create the registration, you have the option of either making it public immediately or making it private for up to four years through an embargo. A registration is useful for certifying what you did in a project in advance of data analysis, or for confirming the exact state of the project at important points of the lifecycle, such as manuscript submission or the onset of data collection. Read more about registrations here.

Registering is an optional feature of OSF.

You can rename a project or component by clicking on its title in the top left of the project or component "Overview" page.

You can move files between components and add-ons (provided the components and add-ons are a part of the same project) by simply dragging and dropping from within the "Files" section on the project "Overview" page or in the "Files" tab via the project navigation bar. The Dataverse add-on does not currently support this functionality.

You may have been removed from the project by one of the administrators. You can get in touch with one of the administrators to ask if you were deleted and whether they can re-add you to the project.

Yes, send us an email with your DOI and the new location of your materials and we will update the URL associated with your DOI.

You can view, download, delete, and rename any files uploaded into OSF Storage. Plain text files can be edited in your browser. All files are assigned unique, persistent identifiers, suitable for use in citations. 

Files in third party storage add-ons might have restrictions on renaming or deleting.

The search function only returns public projects, so if you are searching for one of your own private projects, it will not be returned in the results. To search for your own projects, go to your dashboard and look through the list displayed there, or use the "My Projects" tab in the navigation bar.

The best way to create a lab or organizational group on the OSF is to create a project for that group. Then, individual projects within the lab can either be organized into components of the lab project or into their own projects which are linked to the lab group project. For an example, check out the Reproducibility Project: Psychology.

You may be in the project rather than the registration. To go to your registration, open the project that you registered, and click the Registrations tab in the navigation bar. You'll be taken to the "Registrations" page, where all registrations associated with the project will be listed. Select the registration you want to view from the list.

Alternatively, you can access all your registrations by clicking the My Projects tab in the navigation bar, then clicking All my registrations from the sidebar, and selecting the registration from the list.

It isn't possible to move projects to be nested below one another at this time. However, you can simulate this structure by adding links to the desired projects from the main project, and the links will appear on the project page under "Components" — see our help guide for step-by-step instructions.

You can search for content using the main search feature in the navigation bar. Simply click the Search tab, and type in your search criteria using Lucene search syntax. For example:

•  tags:(engineering)

You can then filter results using the sidebar options, e.g. projects, files, users, preprints, registrations, etc.

Please fill out our Ambassadors Interest Form, and we will reach out to you once we have reviewed your submission. For more information on the ambassador's program, visit the following links:

• https://cos.io/our-communities/become-ambassador/
• https://osf.io/bs23x/

Please refer to our help guide here for step-by-step instructions.

After submitting your registration, you would have received an email titled "Registration pending for one of your projects" in which there will be a link to approve your registration. If you didn't receive this email, try checking your spam or quarantine folders to see if the email was sent there.

All admins on the registration can approve the registration by clicking the link. If an admin disapproves the registration, the registration will be canceled. If the admins do not take action via the email, the registration will become registered automatically after 48 hours.

The 48-hour cycle runs from midnight on the day you submitted the registration to midnight on the second day. Try checking back at midnight.

If you need to register before midnight, you would have received an email titled "Registration pending for one of your projects" in which there will be a link to approve your registration. If you can't find this email, try checking your spam or quarantine folders to see if the email was sent there.

Try checking your spam and quarantine folders to see if the email was sent there. If you still don't find it, please submit a request to user support, and we will help you.

The privacy settings of projects and registrations are independent from each other. Making your project public will not affect the embargo on the registrations. The only way to make a registration public is to actively end the embargo.

Once a registration has become public, it cannot be made private. However, if you need to, you can create a new, embargoed registration, and then withdraw the original one. For transparency best practices, please provide a link to the new registration in the justification for withdrawal and provide a brief explanation of the reason for withdrawal.