Shared Investment in OSF Sustainability

"We launched the Open Science Framework (OSF) in 2012 as infrastructure to support our mission to change the research culture toward openness, integrity, and reproducibility. With OSF, our goal is to make rigor and transparency enhancing behaviors possible, easy, and efficient to ease onboarding of researchers who are responding to shifting cultural norms, incentives, and policies promoting open research. Like many other service providers in the open research community, we have been amazed at the enthusiasm and pace of the community adopting open research. For example, our user base has grown non-linearly every year and recently hit 250,000 registered users....

Google provides hosting services for OSF, and the bill for storage and hosting has been increasing an average of 5% per month, every month. At this rate, within a few years, the entire budget for the Center for Open Science would be going to Google.  

COS’s sustainability model begins with its $250,000 preservation fund, which ensures data hosted on OSF will remain should COS ever close its doors. We also actively collaborate with groups such as Internet Archive to distribute and steward long-term access to open research data by implementing sustainable infrastructure for libraries, open repositories, and other data curators....

Starting November 3, 2020, OSF will limit the storage capacity for private projects to 5 GB of OSF Storage, and 50 GB for public projects. Please take a moment to learn more and review what these storage changes may mean for you, your collaborators, and your existing storage workflows...."