Community Metadata Schemas Available on OSF with CEDAR

Metadata, or data describing research, is the magic ingredient that enables projects, data, analysis code, and research materials to be made FAIR. The Open Science Framework (OSF) has already implemented strong metadata practices and improved the core metadata used to describe things stored on OSF. However, a limitation of the current metadata framework on OSF is that, by virtue of our goal to serve as many research areas as possible, it is very general. To really describe research objects in detail, communities need specialized metadata schemas.

CEDAR integration with OSF allows research communities to annotate their OSF objects with specialized metadata templates. This means that researchers who want to annotate their data need only to select the specialized template on OSF and fill out the additional metadata form. On public OSF projects, registrations, and files, the contents of the extra form are displayed alongside the OSF standard metadata. It is also possible to download the additional metadata as a JSON file.

Read about the available templates below, and recommend community schemas for inclusion on OSF.

Which community standards are available on OSF?

• Human Cognitive Neuroscience Data

  • Are you afraid nobody can find your opened dataset in cognitive neuroscience?

    The template aims to generate and share standardized metadata of cognitive neuroscience research projects with human subjects, to enrich publicly accessible domain-specific metadata, and subsequently enhance the discoverability/searchability and reusability of the shared resource. 

    This metadata template was developed by the research team at the Max Planck Institute of Empirical Aesthetics in collaboration with DataCite. The template was built as part of the Implementing FAIR Workflows Project (TWCF0568), funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

    The template was built with the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) Workbench. Learn more about CEDAR metadata templates here.

    Feel free to contact Zefan Zheng per email if you have any questions about the metadata template.

• LDbase Project Metadata Form
  • LDbase is an NIH-funded behavioral research data repository for studies on Learning and Development. The LDbase taxonomy includes descriptors for projects in the fields of educational and developmental sciences, emphasizing the key terms and pieces of metadata that are important for learning and development research specifically. Developed as a collaboration between researchers and librarians, LDbase is a first-of-its-kind project-oriented data repository, containing decades of knowledge and including data ranging from pre-K to higher education on a variety of different topics and subfields of research.
    
    
    Each field is designed to collect a different piece of information related to the project, gathering metadata on information related to the project's design and methodologies, the individuals and organizations involved, the constructs assessed and the composition of participants, and much more. Help text is provided for the fields to assist in the completion of this form and can be accessed by hovering over the question mark symbol alongside each field. When applicable, options are available for adding additional cases or instances for fields such as project investigator where multiple entries will need to be identified. A list of potential terms has further been identified for each field, providing a list of options to choose from for each field to allow for quicker and more efficient completion of this form. Finally, although not all fields are required, we strongly recommend and encourage completing as many of the fields as possible, as the information provided will help in the discoverability and subsequent reuse of your project.
• metaBUS
  • metaBUS metadata template for applied psychology and organizational research
• OSF Enhanced Metadata (Datacite 4.4)
  • The purpose of this form is to add additional metadata (descriptive information) to the OSF object (project or file) associated with it. The form is based on the DataCite metadata schema (version 4.4) that is itself built from DublinCore. Completing the form will render a JSON file that can be viewed and downloaded by viewers of your OSF content.
• Psych-DS Official Template
  • Psych-DS is a community data standard that provides a systematic way of formatting and documenting scientific datasets, particularly in the psychological and behavioral sciences. 
    
    
    Our data standard provides a lightweight set of guidelines for creating consistently and sensibly structured data directories with human- and machine-readable metadata files. The goal of the project is to help researchers take their important first steps in making their valuable data not just available, but interpretable and interoperable to the broader community.