On August 11, the Center for Open Science (COS) announced significant changes coming to the Open Science Framework (OSF) that will reduce its functionality. Over the next several months, the OSF Projects workflow will be phased out as an active workspace. Researchers have used this component of OSF for project collaboration, file management, and storage, making this a critical loss for the scientific community. Unfortunately, COS cannot sustain the increasingly costly and complex OSF as it currently functions over the long term (read more about why OSF is changing here). Moving forward, OSF will be more focused on supporting study planning, preregistration, preprint services, and links between research plans, related materials, and results.
There are two key dates of changes that users should be aware of:
- On November 16, 2026, users will no longer be able to create new projects or project components. If users intend to use OSF Projects for any new work, they must do so before this date.
- On February 19, 2027, OSF public and private projects will become read-only, and registrations can no longer be created from projects. After this date, projects can no longer be changed, and users must rely on the dedicated registration workflow to create new registrations.
All public OSF content will remain accessible even after these changes go into effect.
COS has created a document to help users manage the transition. How individual researchers employ OSF Projects will determine their next steps, with some facing more substantial impacts than others. Additionally, COS will host a webinar on August 27 to provide an overview of these changes and answer questions from users (register for the webinar here and submit questions in advance here).
