Open access repositories

One of the things that can make open research difficult to ease into is that there are many different resources, with contradictory or confusing advice on the best ways to engage in different open research practices. It can be onerous to find and navigate the multiple platforms, software packages and systems.

Luckily, the Open Science Framework (OSF) does a lot of this work for us. The OSF is a free, open platform that supports research and enables collaboration. It also provides guides on different aspects of open research. The OSF is not the only way to engage with different open research practices, but since it has functionality that covers several open research practices at once, it can be a good place to start. Some of the ways that you can use the OSF are outlined below.

Projects

OSF projects allows you to plan, collaborate, and organise your research studies. First, you create an OSF account. Then create a project: think of it as a folder for everything to do with one study. You can add collaborators, upload files, and review any additional capabilities that you may or may not want to use (e.g. integration with different software like Google docs or GitHub). Projects can be kept private or made public, so this can be a great way to share your data and materials publicly when they’re ready. Some people find it helpful to add materials as they progress with a study, and others just upload everything when finished.

Preregistration

You can also use the OSF to preregister your studies. Preregistration plans can be of various levels of specificity (from answering a few quick questions to creating extensive documents including analysis plans), and these different levels can all be preregistered on the OSF with a variety of templates for research from different disciplines or methodologies. After you have drafted your preregistration, once you ‘register’ them officially, they get locked and timestamped. You can link your preregistration to your OSF project, which also enables you to include any additional documents related to your project.

Preprints

You can also use the OSF to upload a preprint of your work. As you learned in Week 6, a preprint is an open-access version of your work. A preprint server is the platform that hosts your preprint: it is free to access, both for you, the uploader, and your readers. Preprint servers are usually by research discipline, but can also be organised in other ways, e.g. AfricaArXiv is a preprint server for research done by African researchers across all disciplines. Several preprint servers are hosted through the OSF (including, but not limited to, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and SportRxiv). If none of the listed servers represent your work well then you can also upload your preprint under the general ‘OSF preprints’. You can also link the preprint to your OSF project, so readers can easily access other materials related to your project.

In general, the OSF is a great ‘one-stop shop’ for enacting many of the open research practices that you have learned about in this course. By learning how to navigate and use this one platform, you can integrate many open research practices into your research habits. But it is not the only trusted repository – as you learned in Week 2, there are various institutional and discipline repositories. The Open University also has its own research repository for collaborating, planning and organising research projects, called ORDO.

Activity 2:

Allow about an hour

This activity will familiarise you with two open access repositories: ORDO and OSF.

Activity 2.1:

In the second part of this activity, we turn our attention to the OSF. If you belong to a discipline for which the OSF would not be a natural choice, you can substitute a different repository that is targeted to your discipline.

Activity 2.2: