 Meet Sophia. She's an early career researcher who is well-versed in her field. Sophia believes that all aspects of scientific research should be transparent and reproducible, that all steps of the research life cycle are valuable, that a well-crafted hypothesis, protocol, or data collection are still important even when experiments don't go as planned. Upon exploring these ideals, she came across the term open science, but isn't sure how she can put these concepts into practice. Through conversations with her colleagues, she learns about a research management tool called the Open Science Framework or OSF. Admittedly, Sophia was excited, but a bit nervous. Following open science guidelines feels like an intimidating undertaking and she has many questions about where to begin. The OSF is an online platform that enables researchers to transparently plan collect, analyze, and share their work throughout the entire research life cycle. Each tool available on the OSF is specifically designed to promote the integrity of research while supporting researchers' individual comfort levels related to sharing and collaboration. Because of its focus on research integrity, the OSF has caught the attention of institutions with open access policies, publication journals, and even funding agencies, both private or government. Let's follow Sophia as she explores and learns how some of her common problems in research can be addressed by the tools available to her for free on the OSF. Sophia, like most researchers, is always brainstorming new ideas for studies that can contribute to her field in exciting ways. Before a new idea takes shape, she evaluates the research landscape to see what has been investigated recently. Traditionally, she's always used reference platforms or specific journals, but many publications can have outdated results and often provide only information regarding successful studies. What if another researcher had tried her new idea but it didn't produce the expected outcomes? How can the scientific community learn from their mistakes if they only share perfect, expected results? Sophia heard about the Open Science Framework again recently at a presentation hosted by her University's Library Research Services. Curiosity peaked, Sophia decides to take a look through the OSF to see what others in her field are working on. Her goal, to verify that an idea she has for a new study, is not being done elsewhere or if it is to learn from their results. Through her search on the OSF, Sophia is surprised to not only find prepublication manuscripts, but also countless cutting-edge research protocols, collected data and analyses related to her research interests. Since these other researchers have shared their work on the OSF, she is now able to build off their study ideas from all stages of research. Sophia is reassured that her research idea is unique and untested. All the materials shared on the OSF open the door for new potential collaborations on future projects. Now that Sophia has a good idea for a research project, she wants to begin to design a study and start collecting any materials she might need. While searching for an idea, she was able to see firsthand how valuable it is to share your research plan for not only the credibility of the researcher, but the benefit of the scientific community. She's excited to take her first step in open science practices and recognizes that the research plans she found are called pre-registrations. In order to be as transparent as possible and to document her idea for future reference, Sophia decides to start to put together a pre-registration in the OSF. In her pre-registration, Sophia tells the story of her study, including her research questions, protocols and data collection plans, as well as adding any materials or collaborators. Once Sophia finalizes her plan and creates a pre-registration, it is time-stamped with a permanent digital object identifier, or DOI for future reference, and it is archived for permanent storage. The registration is therefore a centralized point of reference for anyone interested in finding out about Sophia's study and can even link to the study's files and other resources. Creating a registration before she begins the project helps Sophia if she decides to seek funding from funding agencies that require open science practices. Sophia has heard many stories about research ideas being stolen or scooped. If Sophia is worried about sharing her work or registration while it is still in progress, she can also embargo access or temporarily make her registration private for up to four years. While embargo Sophia can create an anonymized, if you only link for sharing with potential reviewers or funders. Sophia is confident in her registered study plan, but things can change. If she does need to make an amendment to her study plan, she can create an update to her registration. Any changes are recorded with a descriptive summary of each. This allows Sophia to create a clear story for other researchers to follow her registration from original concept to the current version. Sophia has explored the landscape within her field, come up with a great research idea and registered it on the OSF. She has been working with a few of her colleagues throughout the process, but in the past she's had problems with collaborations outside her institution. There always seem to be difficulties associated with access to the study's current data and changes to methods or protocols. Research institutions often provide different storage options to their researchers, making it difficult to collect all of the data from different collaborators in one place. She envisioned setting up a hub where she and her collaborators and any other research lab partners can easily upload and share the data generated during the study. To facilitate this transition, the OSF automatically created a project space for her and she created her pre-registration. Sophia uses her OSF project as a central, collaborative space that allows her team to store and share materials and manage their study throughout the research life cycle. Sophia notices that projects can be made public or private at any time. And access to the project can be given to her external stakeholders or restricted to just her research team. In contrast to the pre-registration Sophia created, which is like a snapshot of her study frozen in time, her OSF project is like a sandbox where work is constantly ongoing. Materials are easily stored, findable, and editable, and recent activity can be tracked by all team members. Sophia is able to integrate her OSF project space with a variety of common external storage providers for uploading data, code, images, or even videos. This means that all the files from Sophia and her team on their preferred storage providers can be aggregated together on her OSF project without having to re-upload each file. Each of these files from external storage providers can still render on her OSF project. Sophia uses the wiki section on her project as a bulletin board. She is able to coordinate with her team members leaving messages about objectives, plans, and making sure everyone is on the same page. All of Sophia and her team's activities on the project are included in an activity log, tracking the various changes to files and organization. Any changes to her project space do not affect her initial pre-registration. As Sophia's study grows, she creates a directory of materials in her OSF project by creating sub-projects or components. Sophia is now able to create as many components or new OSF projects as she needs for her study. Now that Sophia and her team have completed the analysis for their study, she's excited to share her fresh new manuscript with others in her community. Sophia's pre-print receives its own permanent DOI and is indexed by other discovery services on the web. She can update her pre-print at any time to include new information and all versions are available for readers. Following open science practices, she makes the entirety of the study's life cycle clear. Sophia adds links to her OSF project on her pre-registration as well as links to any subsequent publications making all of the steps of her research project available together. The pre-print, as with the other resources she has developed on the OSF, reveals the relationships between her paper, her team, her analysis, her research plan, her institution, and herself. With the closing of her study, Sophia is in an interesting position in the research life cycle. She's promoting the discoverability of her concluded study while keeping an eye out for her next idea. She's also looking to comply with any requirements from her funder and institution's open science reporting requirements. The agency that provided the funding for the study requires that Sophia report back on her project and show the appropriate data and findings that are openly available. From the funder's perspective, the goal is to make sure that a completed study is accessible and persistent to the scientific community. In addition to Sophia's funding reporting requirements, the institution that employs Sophia asks for reports of her annual research activity. Both of these common problems can be easily solved because Sophia used the OSF to manage her study and publicize her results. Sophia can share the permanent DOI to her pre-print directly stored on the OSF. Alternatively, she can search through the pre-print repository or Google Scholar if she doesn't have the DOI readily available. She is able to provide DOIs for her public registration and project as well. The OSF provides her with analytics including the number of downloads and views on her pre-print, registration and project to be able to report as required. Sophia's registration and materials in her OSF project are linked from the pre-print and vice versa, helping make the full study of her research study available online. Her institution can find the pre-print on the OSF pre-print repository or through Google Scholar. Sophia's institution also has an OSF institution's membership, so a public material including Sophia's study is aggregated and shared on their dashboard. Because of this, Sophia's work is getting noticed even at her own institution as her colleague down the hall congratulates her on her new publication. Now that Sophia has successfully finished her first OSF project, she is eager to go back and get started on her next study, which was inspired by some of her findings. She starts her new project off as she did the previous one with a search of OSF to see what other researchers in her field are up to. Sophia can now use the OSF to support her research goals, but like anyone who's trying something new, she has more questions. If she ever has a question or experiences a problem, she can go to our OSF support center. Here, she finds an extensive set of help guides and resources to help answer her questions. Sections of the support center correspond to sections of the OSF, including help guides on registrations, preprints, projects, and even information for her account. Additionally, she finds a getting started section for new users, FAQs, and even translated resources in other languages. Sophia has a specific question, but isn't sure what section of the support center it would fall under. She decides to utilize the search bar at the top, which aggregates the help guide results based on key words from the question. Normally, this helps her find her answer, but no luck this time. If she can't find an answer to her question, Sophia knows that she can always ask customer support for help, where she will receive a message from dedicated staff members trained in all aspects of the OSF. The help center is a valuable resource and Sophia returns regularly as she continues to learn about the OSF.