OSF Changes: A Note to Users

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OSF Changes: A Note to Users

August 11th, 2026,

Brian Nosek

Posted in:<br>Strategy,<br>OSF,<br>Lifecycle Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) has announced a significant change for the Open Science Framework (OSF). This post assumes that you are already familiar with the changes coming to OSF over the next several months. If you are not, read this.

This is a big change, but it is important for the effectiveness, resilience, and sustainability of OSF. Simultaneously, we recognize that this will have a significant impact on users, especially early adopters and those who have integrated OSF into their work in routine and creative ways. You put your trust and time into making OSF part of your research workflow, and now functions that are important for you may no longer be supported in OSF itself. I am very sorry that this change will require many of you to redesign established workflows. The COS team has created support materials to aid the transition. Please reach out for help when you need it. We will do everything we can to support you continuing to do your science openly.

OSF users, COS supporters, and contributors to the open science reform movement might be interested to understand more of the history leading up to this change. Part 1 of this post provides the historical rationale for OSF; Part 2 describes the implications and where we are headed.

Part 1

OSF was conceived in a failed 2007 grant proposal. Some reviewers thought it was naive because, they said, researchers don’t want to share. The idea was re-energized in 2011 by Jeff Spies as his dissertation project. We self-funded the project through my lab until receiving our initial grant in 2013 from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to launch COS.

Our animating vision was expansive: to build the "connective tissue" for cumulative, transparent science. We wanted to seamlessly integrate services across every stage of the research lifecycle—planning, conducting, reporting, and evaluating—so that any researcher could access all of the contents created and used in research, and play back the history of a project to evaluate or build upon it. We conceived OSF as a collaborative space for teams that naturally documented their work as it happened. And, when the teams were ready to do so, OSF would make it trivial to transition their work, and its documented history, into the open. Working openly and in the cloud was still new and unfamiliar to many; OSF could provide an easy onboarding process.

We opened OSF for public use in 2012, several months before starting COS. Open science concepts were new and different from researchers' existing work routines, so we made two key decisions to recruit innovators to shape how open science could be done with OSF. First, we did not require openness from the start. We perceived that it would be easier for researchers to adopt open science by solving challenges they faced naturally in their work, for example with collaboration and data management. Research labs are dynamic environments with people joining and departing all the time. Data and other records are often being managed inconsistently or barely at all. OSF provided a shared, cloud-based solution so that researchers would not lose their own work for their own use. If a computer exploded or a postdoc moved on, the work would still be accessible to all the other collaborators. While solving that problem on the one hand, we trivialized the act of becoming open on the other. A little button on every page invited users to turn that private content public. Click it, and a “Are you sure?” warning appeared. Click yes, and that research content was open. OSF embodied the idea that making research open should just be a decision one makes during the research lifecycle rather than a whole new set of work appended to the end of the research process. Too much of the open science system, even today, thinks of open science as a retrospective process that begins upon publication. After the researchers are done with the research, they go back and prepare to share everything they did in the years leading up to the paper. Retrospective open science is error-prone and highly burdensome: A common joke-not-joke is that the person that benefits most from preparing and sharing well documented research is yourself six months from now because you...