Sunday, October 29, 2017

Open Science Framework - OSF

And recently I discovered OSF, the Open Science Framework. My students told me that there exists many of them, of this type of on-line tools that make leverage of the cloud to store and helps groups to manage their workflow. However, OSF seems particularly well suited to work for scientists’ group, since it contains links various science-oriented features, like connections to Mendeley, Figshare, Github and others. An OSF “project” can contain writings, figures, codes, data. All of this can be uploaded for free in their servers or being maintained in one of your cloud storage like Dropbox or GoogleDrive. 

For starting, you can take one our of your time to follow one of their YouTube video, like the one below.

Their web page contains also some useful guides that make the rest (do not hesitate to click on icons: they contain useful material!). The first you can start with is the one about the wiki, a customizable initial page that appear in any project or sub-project. There are some characteristics that I want to emphasize here. Startin a new project is easy, and when you have learn how to do it, you almost have learn all of it. Any project can have subprojects, called “components”. Each component behaves like a project by itself, so when dealing with it, you do not have to learn something really new. Any (sub)project can be private (the default) or public, separately, and therefore your global workflow can contain private and public stuff. 

Many people are working on OSF. For instance Titus Brown’s Living in a Ivory Basement blog also has some detailed review of it. They also coded a command line client for downloading files from OSF which can be further useful.  

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