Matthew Spitzer
Community Manager
Center for Open Science
Institutional research support services have the considerable challenge of accessing and supporting the wide variety of research workflows across both disciplines and project lifecycle. The integration of these services within (rather than appended to) the researcher’s workflow is critical for increased adoption. The Open Science Framework (OSF), a free, open source scholarly commons and workflow management service, was designed to address exactly these challenges via modular, flexible workflow components and an array of 3rd party service integrations, such as Dropbox, Github, and Dataverse. In collaboration with the University of Notre Dame, the OSF has been expanded to include institution-specific customization in order to integrate more deeply with local services and workflows and to enhance institutional collaboration and research visibility. Released in the Spring of 2016, OSF for Institutions provides a free platform that can support workflows across departments and across the research lifecycle, from project formation and data gathering to publishing and archiving. Current customizations include institutional branding and project affiliation, custom URLs, institutional sign-on/authentication, institutional storage archiving, and institution-specific dashboards, analytics, and APIs. With enhanced visibility for institutional stakeholders of on-going and unpublished research, the impact of research data can be shared, measured, and expanded. This session will highlight the core OSF architecture available for institutions, the challenges that it addresses, and how this infrastructure can specifically support the institutional research mission with a collaborative approach to bridging current gaps in today’s research lifecycle. We are particularly interested in receiving additional feedback on other (perhaps institution-specific) challenges from the community that support research in order to ensure that ongoing development matches the needs of stakeholders.
Presentation (PDF)