Open Science Framework (OSF)
The open-science workbench — manage a project, preregister, and share it all.
At a Glance
- Publisher
- Center for Open Science (a nonprofit)
- Coverage
Not a content database — a free platform to manage research projects, store files, preregister studies, and share preprints and materials, with connectors to many storage services.
- Access
Free; open API; optional add-on storage.
- Free alternative
- It is free.
- Regional
Global; central to the reproducibility movement.
Our Take
OSF is the hub of the open-science and reproducibility movement — a free workspace where a study lives end to end: files, protocols, preregistrations, analysis, and the eventual preprint, all linkable and versioned. Its preregistration and registered-report support is why it matters for research integrity. It’s a workflow and sharing tool, not a searchable literature database, so you come here to run open, transparent projects and to inspect others’. Use it to preregister and share your work reproducibly, and to check the materials behind a study that links to it.
Power Tips
- Preregister your hypotheses and analysis plan here before collecting data to guard against p-hacking.
- Link storage (Google Drive, GitHub, Dropbox) so the whole project lives in one navigable place.
- When a paper links to an OSF project, open it to inspect the real data and code.
Alternatives & Complements
Zenodo, figshare, GitHub, AsPredicted
Figures last verified: June 15, 2026