The Center for Open Science (COS) is a nonprofit research-culture organization, founded in 2013, that builds and operates the Open Science Framework (OSF) — a free, open-source platform for research project management and preregistration. COS is the organization; OSF is the product. COS also runs the TOP Guidelines and funds metascience research on reproducibility.
This guide covers what COS actually is, how OSF works as a project-management and preregistration platform, the standards and initiatives COS runs beyond OSF itself, and where COS/OSF fits relative to other open science infrastructure an institution might already be evaluating.
What the Center for Open Science Is
COS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, not a commercial vendor, and it does not charge researchers or institutions to use OSF’s core functionality. Its funding comes from a mix of foundation grants (the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, now Arnold Ventures, has been a major early and ongoing funder), federal grants, and institutional and publisher partnerships, rather than subscription revenue from end users. That funding model matters for procurement conversations: unlike a proprietary CRIS module or citation database, there is no license negotiation or per-seat cost for an institution whose researchers want to use OSF.
COS’s stated mission has three parts, and its programs map onto each of them:
- Infrastructure — building and maintaining OSF as free, open-source software for managing the research lifecycle.
- Metascience — running and funding empirical research on how science itself works, most visibly the large-scale Reproducibility Project: Psychology, which attempted to replicate findings from 100 published psychology studies and became a widely cited data point in what researchers now call the reproducibility crisis.
- Community and culture change — training, incentives, and policy standards intended to shift research norms toward openness, including the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines and journal/funder badge programs described below.
In 2021, COS received the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (institutional category), recognition specifically for its contribution to research integrity and transparency infrastructure.
The Open Science Framework (OSF): What It Actually Does
OSF is a free, open-source web platform that functions as a project management and collaboration tool for the entire research lifecycle, not just a repository for finished outputs. A research team can use an OSF project to:
- Manage a project privately during active work — version-controlled file storage, collaborator permissions, and a wiki-style project description — before deciding what, if anything, to make public.
- Pre-register a study’s hypotheses, design, and analysis plan before data collection, time-stamped and (optionally) held under an embargo before automatic public release. This is the mechanism behind CASRAI’s pre-registration and Registered Report entries — OSF Registries is the infrastructure most Registered Report workflows and journal preregistration badges actually run on.
- Connect external storage and tools — OSF integrates with services like Dropbox, GitHub, Google Drive, Box, and figshare rather than requiring researchers to migrate everything into OSF’s own storage, which lowers the switching cost for a lab that already has an established workflow.
- Publish preprints through OSF Preprints, which itself hosts or has hosted branded preprint services for a number of disciplinary communities (PsyArXiv for psychology and SocArXiv for social science are the most established examples), built on the same underlying OSF infrastructure.
- Mint a persistent identifier for a public project or registration, so it can be cited and linked reliably the same way a DOI-registered dataset or article can.
Because OSF projects can move from fully private to fully public at any stage, it is closer to a lab notebook with a publish button than it is to a traditional institutional or disciplinary data repository. Institutions sometimes ask how it relates to their existing repository strategy: OSF is not a substitute for a CoreTrustSeal-certified domain or generalist repository used for long-term data preservation — see CASRAI’s guide on choosing an open data repository — but it is frequently used alongside one, as the workspace where the research process itself is documented and preregistered before final data and materials are deposited elsewhere for archiving.
Standards and Programs COS Runs Beyond OSF
COS’s influence on research policy extends past the software itself, through standards and structured programs that institutions, journals, and funders reference directly:
- TOP Guidelines (Transparency and Openness Promotion). A modular set of standards — covering data citation, data/materials/code transparency, design and analysis transparency, preregistration, and replication — that a journal or funder can adopt at different levels of stringency. Journals that adopt TOP typically publish which level they require for each standard, giving authors a concrete compliance checklist rather than a vague openness policy.
- Registered Reports. COS helped popularize and now tracks adoption of the Registered Reports publishing format, in which a journal peer-reviews and provisionally accepts a study’s introduction, hypotheses, and methods before results exist, reducing publication bias against null results. See CASRAI’s Registered Report entry for how the two-stage review process works.
- Reproducibility Project: Psychology and related large-scale replications. COS-coordinated, multi-lab replication efforts that are frequently cited as evidence in discussions of the reproducibility crisis and in institutional research-integrity training.
- SCORE and related metascience initiatives. COS has run funded programs (including work supported by DARPA) that develop and test methods for algorithmically estimating the credibility of published claims across social and behavioral science — an active area rather than a finished, settled standard.
Why This Matters for Research Data Management
For an institution building or updating data management plan guidance, three practical points come up repeatedly:
- OSF is a legitimate, no-cost answer to “where should researchers preregister and manage a project?” — worth naming explicitly in DMP templates and RCR training alongside discipline-specific alternatives, rather than leaving preregistration as an abstract requirement with no concrete tool attached.
- OSF is not a preservation repository in the CoreTrustSeal sense, and DMP language should not conflate “we will use OSF” with “we have a certified long-term archiving plan” — the two commitments are complementary, not interchangeable. See CASRAI’s guide to CoreTrustSeal certification for the criteria a repository is actually being judged against.
- TOP Guidelines adoption is a useful proxy question when evaluating a journal’s or funder’s transparency requirements — knowing a publisher’s TOP level tells a research office concretely what documentation a submitting researcher will be asked to provide, rather than having to interpret an author-guidelines page from scratch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Center for Open Science the same thing as OSF?
No. COS is the nonprofit organization; OSF (Open Science Framework) is the free, open-source software platform COS builds and operates. COS also runs programs — TOP Guidelines, Registered Reports advocacy, the Reproducibility Project, and metascience research — that are separate from OSF itself, though OSF is usually the infrastructure those programs run on.
Is OSF free to use?
Yes. OSF’s core functionality — project management, file storage integrations, preregistration, and preprint posting — is free for researchers and institutions, funded by COS’s grants and partnerships rather than user subscriptions.
Does OSF replace a certified data repository?
Not on its own. OSF is designed for managing and preregistering the research process and for making project materials public, not specifically for long-term, certified data preservation. Institutions typically use OSF for project workflow and preregistration alongside a separate, certified repository (institutional, disciplinary, or generalist) for final data archiving.
What are the TOP Guidelines?
The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines are a modular set of standards, developed with COS involvement, that journals and funders can adopt to specify what level of data citation, materials transparency, design/analysis transparency, preregistration, and replication they require or encourage from authors.
What is the Reproducibility Project?
The Reproducibility Project: Psychology was a large-scale, COS-coordinated effort in which many research teams attempted to replicate the findings of 100 previously published psychology studies. Its results are widely cited in discussions of the reproducibility crisis and in institutional research-integrity and rigor training.
