Using OSF for Research Projects

Thanks to its versatile features, OSF is used by researchers as their electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) to ensure good documentation of lab activities.  Specifically, OSF helps researchers:

• Manage team members by specifying collaborators and setting their permission levels
• Record and organize team members' notes about observations and procedures
• Share information about research methods and protocols
• Store project files, perform version control, and set privacy settings (Please note that OSF is not HIPAA-compliant and should not be used to store research data with personally identifiable information.)
• Connect to external online tools for cloud storage and citation management
• Share research products such as preprints and datasets

In sum, researchers can create detailed and well-organized ELNs to document their lab operations and to enhance the reproducibility of their projects.  To help researchers with the setup of an ELN, OSF offers an ELN template as well as a guide to using its wiki as an ELN.  It also provides this example and the following video on this topic. 

Information about using OSF to manage research projects can also be helpful.  If you would like more information about ELNs in general, refer to this guide.