Data Management
Metadata
Metadata to Increase Discoverability
Metadata is a tool to provide important information on your registration, preprint, files, or project at a summary level. Adding metadata to your research can help others discover and understand your work, improving the clarity of research data and other materials.
OSF leverages key metadata that provide the most effective ways for you to describe your research. OSF utilizes a unique metadata model that facilitates FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as well as enable connections across the research lifecycle. The OSF Metadata Profile describes the community vocabularies and persistent identifiers that the OSF utilizes, the relationships available between metadata fields, the metatags used to enable enhanced web discovery, and an overall map of the metadata implementation.
The OSF Search interface offers a few options for filtering search results. However, with knowledge of some specific search syntax, you can do even more powerful searching of OSF using specific metadata fields
Community Metadata templates using CEDAR
Using the CEDAR metadata tool, research communities have created metadata standards to help the discoverability of similar research material in a field.
- Add a CEDAR Metadata Record to your Project
- Add a CEDAR Metadata Record to your Registrations
- Add a CEDAR Metadata Record to a File
- Find OSF content with attached CEDAR Metadata Records
Data Management Plans
A data management plan is a living, written document explaining what you intend to do with your data during and following the conclusion of your research project. A data management plan is required by many funders. Even if it is not required, a data management plan can save you time and effort during your research as it forces you to organize your data, prepare it for the next step in its lifecycle, and clarify who will have access to it, how, and when. For more information on data management plans please see our help guides below:
A data management plan helps ensure that your data remains usable to both you, your collaborators, and other researchers beyond the end of your project. Here is how you start.
The purpose of a data dictionary is to explain what all the variable names and values in your spreadsheet really mean.
We encourage sharing of all data, materials, and software code whenever possible. The likelihood that sharing any particular research output will contribute to the benefit of a field depends on many factors including how complete it is, how completely it is documented, where it is stored, and how it is shared.
The OSF is streamlined to facilitate data sharing. This guide explains the process from a new user perspective, assuming minimal experience with the OSF.
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