The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free, open source tool designed to help researchers manage the entire research workflow: planning, execution, reporting, archiving and discovery. It is part collaboration software and part version control system. The OSF can be used to manage individual projects or large collaborative ones. Privacy and sharing settings allow for fine-grained control over access to files and materials stored on the platform - share privately with collaborators or publicly with the community at large. Each project, contributor, and file on the OSF is given a persistent unique identifier, making all research products citable. The platform also mints DOIs and ARKs through DataCite. A collaborative wiki allows contributors to work on writing materials simultaneously.

API connections with other services (Github, Dropbox, Box, Dataverse, Google Drive, figshare, Zotero, Mendeley, Amazon S3) allow researchers to connect other services they already use in order to see all their materials in one place. The OSF also offers a registry for preregistering research projects and/or analysis plans.