Organise Posters and Slides
Emma organises all her posters and presentations and makes them available on OSF. She created a dedicated Project (called “presentations”) and added herself as a contributor to save and share her work.
The advantage of doing so?
- It is great for CVs. You can either share the link directly, or use the “embed” function to embed the code and add the posters (or any other document) to your academic website.
- It is great for new joiners, especially students, coming into a research group. You can easily show them examples of academic posters and get them up to speed with key research areas and outputs.
Example: Here is a link to one of Emma's posters, presented at the 2021 European Stroke Organisation Conference. Here is a link to the presentation slides from the 2023 OSF Induction Event.
Create Study Protocols or Registrations
Emma uses OSF to make study protocols for various research projects – i.e. she documents the research idea before collecting data. For instance, she created a study protocol for her project on developing a machine learning classifier. All the information on this is public, with a DOI and description of the project. It is possible to make tracked amendments, and update it as the project progresses, adding datasets, analyses or publications.
The advantage of doing so?
- She can get feedback from other experts in the field.
- Good for finding collaborators for projects now or in future.
- Others can stay up to date with developments in a specific subject area.
- You are open and transparent about your research process, creating a reproducible research pipeline.
Once she published this research, she put a sentence at the start of the paper saying that the study protocol is available at OSF. For people concerned about deviating from the study protocol, Emma explains: “Deviations from the study protocol are allowed, as long as they are justified. I wrote the justification as an appendix to my paper, and it still got published”. She further elaborates: “The biggest advantage for me was getting feedback on my research plan before I started data collection and analysis. It was helpful to ensure that my plan was robust and once I got started with the work, the protocol acted as a checklist so I always knew what I had to do to get the project finished.”
Example: You can view one of Emma's projects and its associated protocol. The final publication links back to the study protocol and can be found here: Wilson et al. 2023 (CC-BY)
Consolidate Supplementary Data
OSF is a great way to organise data that does not make it into a publication. There is a specific amount of OSF-provided storage for each project. In addition, OSF links up with commonly used cloud-storage e.g. Gitlab and OneDrive – more University guidance on how to configure your OSF account is available here. You get a DOI, a unique persistent URL, to enable citing and sharing research materials stored on OSF. This feature was crucial for Emma when she worked on a project during Covid on how to best synthesize evidence in public health emergencies. She collaborated with various librarians in the US to find best practices for synthesizing databases of rapidly emerging evidence – at the height of Covid, more than 10.000 new studies appeared per week. As there was a lot of supplementary material for this review, not everything could be added to the publication. The supplementary material was made available via OSF, with a link in the research paper.
Example: View the publication on synthesizing evidence in public health emergencies, which references OSF supplementary data: Brody et al. 2023 (CC-BY)
Share Preprints
OSF has a space for subject-specific pre-print repositories. This is where you can upload preprints and have them undergo a community review. It is a great opportunity to share a manuscript not intended for publication or before publication. In doing so, you can speed up the scholarly communications process, get feedback and track impact. Emma was surprised by the engagement for this – she put a preprint up, and got 650 views. “These things don’t just sit there, people notice them”.
Example: View Emma's preprint, which has received more than 650 views - Hair et al. 2022 (CC-BY)
In fact, manuscripts can be picked up and made publishable. For instance, Emma discovered an undergraduate honours project uploaded as a preprint to OSF. “The project was incredibly relevant to my work and something I had considered doing myself”.Emma decided to reach out to see if the student and their supervisor would be interested in publication and offered to help out. This is still work in progress (at the time of writing).
Final Considerations
Overall, Emma has been happy with OSF, and the training and support the platform provides. Any queries that she has had have been resolved in good time.
During the OSF Induction Event, a few key points were brought up by the OSF representative and Research Data Support Team which users at the University of Edinburgh should be aware of:
- It is important to choose the right licence for the data you put onto OSF. Emma always chooses CC-BY, which means that anyone can use her projects as long as she is credited. You can learn more about licences on the Creative Commons website.
- To ensure that researchers comply with GDPR, the server should be configured so that the data is held in Germany.
- OSF is not suitable for sensitive and person identifiable data.
For any questions on OSF, you can visit the OSF website or contact Research Data Support.
OSF Website
Research Data Support
This case study was written by Dr Sarah Janac, Research Facilitator for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, and reviewed by Dr Simon Smith, Research Data Support Officer.
