Has your organization(s) undertaken software development projects? If so, please describe the project, how it was executed, and the current state of this software.
The OSF is a suite of modular, open software tools and services to support scholarly investigation, communication, and preservation–similar to what NIH has described as the data commons. OSF includes (1) a set of services such as authentication, file storage, file rendering, databases for metadata, search, analytics, commenting, moderation, and documentation, (2) an add-on ecosystem of third-party services created by abstracting their APIs to a common API for the purpose of linking researcher tools/storage services already widely adopted to those core OSF services, and (3) an open dataset of metadata called SHARE containing research events from many sources in the scholarly community.
OSF is a platform-as-a-service for scholarly research and communication, much like Salesforce or Amazon Web Services are for their purposes. Interfaces can be built on these open, modular tools to provide service for a variety of functions around the research lifecycle and serving the needs of specific communities. COS develops interfaces and workflows for different stages of the research lifecycle including registries, preprints, meetings, institutions, journals, and repositories. These interfaces are built on top of the OSF services, add-on ecosystem, and SHARE data.
Each interface can be customized and branded for groups to administer themselves in serving their communities. With community interfaces, groups gain access to technologies to increase openness and reproducibility, and simultaneously retain control for governance, norm setting, and experimentation. Establishing branded services also facilitates integration with other services. For example, with OSF Institutions, a university can enable single sign-on so that researchers can login to the OSF using their university credentials. Universities can connect services such as institutional repositories or computational platforms to the OSF to connect them more closely with researchers’ workflows and the rest of the research lifecycle. The Commons gains features such as university single sign-on and integration with institutional repositories “for free” by being an interface on OSF. Community interfaces dramatically lower the technical and resource barriers for groups to provide enterprise-quality services for their community.
Examples of interfaces to the OSF scholarly commons include:
Continual iteration and development can be followed on the Public Requirements and Roadmap and all code is open source at https://github.com/CenterForOpenScience.