The Open Science Framework (OSF) was launched in 2012 and almost overnight became the leading platform for the preservation and sharing of scientific data, materials, and analysis code. It made it far easier to endorse open science by making it easier to practice open science.
Unfortunately, some of that is coming to an end. In an email today, the OSF Team notified users that, come November 2026, the OSF will no longer accept new file uploads.
The email links to a post (htm), where Brian Nosek explains that the OSF is making this change because it is being misused, both by spammers and researchers, leading to maintenance costs that are not sustainable. Regarding spammers, Nosek writes that they “set up thousands of accounts and tried to use OSF for sharing pirated movies, advertising health supplements, and anything and everything else.” Regarding researchers, Nosek writes that many use it for private storage instead of for open science practices.
Right now thousands of researchers are looking for a new home to upload their open-research files to. In this post we explain why ResearchBox is the home they are looking for.
Thank You For Your Service, OSF
We want to start by thanking Brian Nosek, a friend and supportive colleague, along with past and present Center for Open Science (COS) team members, for all the work they have done, and continue to do, to improve research credibility. To thousands of researchers around the world, the OSF is synonymous with open research practices, and many researchers use these practices today because they, or their advisors, learned about them through Brian and the COS team. We look forward to seeing the new initiatives COS will pursue as it shifts its resources and attention away from the OSF.
ResearchBox
ResearchBox is part of the Credibility Lab open-research ecosystem; it is fully integrated with AsPredicted (the most popular pre-registration platform in the social sciences) and AsCollected (the recently launched and sole platform for documenting results-provenance in all of science).
If you have ever done an AsPredicted, you have a ResearchBox account already.
ResearchBox was launched in October 2020 and currently hosts files from 8,970 researchers.
Since its launch, the total number of stored files has roughly doubled each year.
We built ResearchBox for a single purpose: to make it easy for researchers – and only researchers – to share data, code, materials, and pre-registrations with their readers. We did not design it as a collaboration tool, and nor as a place for non-researchers or non-research-related files. ResearchBox’s specialization and simplicity make it well equipped to avoid the issues the OSF has encountered.
On ResearchBox every detail is designed to make research content easy to share, navigate, and understand. Open Science loses much of its value when posted materials are difficult to find or interpret. ResearchBox actively guides researchers in making their shared content useful to others. Among the many unique ResearchBox features that enhance the value of posted content:
- All boxes look the same, as all files are always organized in tables with the same columns.
When visiting any box, you immediately know which files were, and were not, posted:
Fig 1. All boxes are presented in Bingo Tables like this one, always the same columns
Source of example: https://researchbox.org/446 by Overton, Evengelidis, & Vosgerau (2024)
- Files can be previewed nearly instantaneously, including very large datasets [1].
- Every dataset has a codebook.
- To download files, you just check the ones you need, or click a single button to download all.
- You can search the code (e.g., scripts using “lme4”) and data (e.g., variable descriptions including the word “depression”) of publicly available boxes.
- Public boxes are automatically archived to the web archive and to Zenodo, where they obtain a DOI. If ResearchBox shut down today, all public boxes would remain available at those two file preservation platforms.
ResearchBox Works To Avoid The Problems Plaguing The OSF
Misuse and spam were key reasons why OSF is closing its doors to new files.
ResearchBox addresses them through several safeguards, including (but not limited to):
- You can’t create a ResearchBox account with an anonymous email address (e.g., @gmail.com), making it very difficult for anonymous users and non-researchers to use the platform.
Note: After the account is verified, any preferred email (e.g., Gmail) can be used. - The user interface conveys explicitly and through design that it should only be used to share research files for publishable research (minimizing well-intentioned misuse).
- Boxes are algorithmically screened for misuse, and content violating Terms of Use is eliminated.
- Files are not allowed to stay private forever; authors get renewable 3-year clocks to make them public.
- Default storage limits start low for accounts from users with email addresses not associated with research institutions (but upon request & verification, the limit is increased)
In Sum
When it comes to hosting research materials, ResearchBox is:
- Fast: Instant file previews and fast downloads.
- Searchable: Search by variable names, code content, or metadata.
- Standardized: Every ResearchBox landing page follows the same structure.
- Easy to use: No training or tutorials required.
- Committed to file permanence: Public boxes are automatically backed up to both Zenodo, with a unique DOI, and the Internet Archive.
Footnotes.
- ResearchBox creates “thumbnails” of datasets and code scripts, so preview files are tiny and thus quickly opened[↩]