Blog

August 30, 2016 | Charlottesville, VA, and London, UK

We have just announced a new partnership with The Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit science and technology company in Virginia. Overleaf will support the automatic submission of manuscripts authored on our platform onto the new OSF Preprints service that COS is launching this fall. OSF Preprints is a free open source preprint platform built and maintained by COS through their Open Science Framework (OSF). It helps researchers to discover new research as it happens and enables them to receive quick feedback on their own research. The Overleaf integration will initially be available on two OSF Preprints partner services, engrXiv and SocArXiv.

The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology startup founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools such as OSF Preprints. The Open Science Framework (OSF), COS’s flagship product, is a web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use the OSF to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

The addition of the Overleaf format to the OSF platform continues both of our organizations’ ongoing commitment to open and transparent research practices by enabling research technology standards to work seamlessly within the OSF workflow. In addition to Overleaf, the OSF already integrates multiple software tools such as Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3, Github, and figshare. Researchers who work with the engrXiv and SocArXiv services will now be able to create Overleaf projects on the OSF with a one-click submission, connect all the different components of their research on a single, unified platform, and produce preprints for review. Future capabilities could include the ability for OSF users to open and create new Overleaf documents from directly within their OSF project.

“This collaboration illustrates our companies’ mutual commitment to lowering the barriers that might impede open and transparent scientific research practices,” said Brian Nosek, Executive Director of COS. “The ability to create and submit Overleaf documents to the OSF ensures that researchers can use the tools they have come to depend on without compromising their workflow or process in any way. We’re thrilled to make this integration with OSF Preprints possible.”

“Overleaf has always been committed to enabling powerful scientific collaboration and writing. We are also committed to increasing the dissemination of more open, transparent, and reproducible science,” said John Hammersley, Overleaf’s CEO. “This collaboration with COS and OSF Preprints brings the best tools possible together in one platform to help meet those goals. We are thrilled to be a part of it.”