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:
- http://osf.io/ : Primary interface for
individual researchers to interact with the OSF and its suite of
project management, archiving, and registration services.
- http://osf.io/preprints/ :
General interface for preprints that aggregates search across preprint
services and has a simple, user-friendly interface for depositing
preprints.
- http://socarxiv.org/ :
Community-branded version of the OSF Preprints interface operated by
that community (others accessible via http://osf.io/preprints/).
- http://osf.io/registries/ :
Another general interface on OSF, but this one for aggregating search
across registries.
- https://osf.io/institutions/nyu/ : Illustration of an institution-branded interface on OSF.