OSF can serve as a platform for researchers to provide access to their research outputs even if they do not use OSF to manage their research projects. For example, an author can post their preprint (i.e., a manuscript that has not gone through peer review) on OSF to speed up knowledge dissemination and to invite feedback. As OSF provides a time stamp and a digital object identifier (DOI) for the uploaded document, making your preprint available on OSF enables you to establish precedence for your research. To answer your questions about preprints, OSF offers this FAQs page as well as guides to creating preprints and managing them.
The videos below provide an introduction to preprints and how to post them on OSF. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Center for Digital Scholarship.
OSF is also a recognized platform for research data sharing. For instance, you can share the underlying research data for a journal article or a research project. The National Institutes of Health has been promoting OSF as one of the free generalist repositories for research data sharing. Yet, other avenues are available for this purpose, e.g., depositing datasets in Knowledge@UChicago, a digital repository run by the UChicago Library. If you have questions concerning how to go about sharing research data, feel free to contact the Center for Digital Scholarship or refer to this guide.
The video below addresses how repositories facilitates the archiving and sharing of research data.