Open Science Framework Pricing: Free Tiers and Institutional Costs (2026)

Pricing overview

Open Science Framework (OSF) maintains a pricing structure designed to support open research practices, primarily offering its core functionalities free of charge to individual users and researchers. This model facilitates broad accessibility for managing and sharing research projects, data, and preprints. The primary paid offering, OSF Institutions, caters to universities, research centers, and other organizations requiring enhanced features, dedicated support, and administrative controls. This institutional model operates on a custom enterprise pricing basis, reflecting the specific scale and integration needs of larger entities.

The free tier for individuals encompasses extensive capabilities, including the creation of unlimited public projects and significant private storage capacity. This approach aligns with OSF's mission to promote transparency and reproducibility in scientific research by lowering financial barriers to participation. For organizations, the cost is determined by factors such as the number of users, desired integrations with existing institutional systems, and specific compliance or data management requirements. The platform's commitment to supporting open science is evident in its tiered approach, which ensures core services remain accessible while offering advanced solutions for institutional partners.

Plans and tiers

OSF's pricing model primarily distinguishes between individual use and institutional partnerships, rather than offering multiple public subscription tiers. Individual researchers access the platform's core functionalities at no cost. This includes the ability to create, manage, and share research projects, register studies, and host preprints on OSF Preprints. The free tier provides substantial resources for common research workflows, making it a viable option for most independent researchers and small collaborations.

For organizations, the OSF Institutions program represents the sole paid tier. This program is tailored for universities, libraries, research consortia, and funding agencies. It offers a suite of advanced features designed to meet the administrative, compliance, and integration needs of larger entities. These features typically include:

• Centralized Administration: Tools for managing researcher profiles, projects, and institutional branding across the OSF platform.
• Custom Integrations: Ability to integrate OSF with existing institutional systems, such as federated identity management (e.g., Shibboleth), institutional repositories, and data storage solutions.
• Enhanced Reporting and Analytics: Access to data on institutional research output, engagement, and compliance.
• Dedicated Support: Prioritized technical support and consultation services for institutional administrators and researchers.
• Customizable Workflows: Options for tailoring OSF functionalities to specific institutional policies and research management protocols.
• Increased Storage Options: While individual projects have specific limits, institutions can negotiate broader storage solutions.

The pricing for OSF Institutions is not publicly disclosed and requires direct engagement with the Center for Open Science (COS) for a custom quote. This allows COS to assess an institution's specific requirements, user base size, desired integrations, and support needs to provide a relevant cost estimate. This model contrasts with many commercial API providers, such as Stripe or Twilio, which often publish detailed, usage-based pricing tables for their various service tiers.

Plan comparison table

Free tier and limits

The Open Science Framework offers a comprehensive free tier designed to support individual researchers and small teams in practicing open science. This free access is a cornerstone of OSF's mission to enhance the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research globally. The key components and limits of the free tier include:

• Unlimited Public Projects: Users can create an unlimited number of public projects, making it easy to share research outputs, data, and methodologies widely. There are no restrictions on the number of contributors to public projects.
• 5GB Private Storage Per Project: Each private project on OSF comes with a generous 5GB of storage. This allows researchers to manage sensitive or in-progress data before making it public or archiving it elsewhere. While storage is per project, users can create multiple private projects, effectively expanding their total private storage capacity.
• Core OSF Products: The free tier includes full access to OSF Projects (for collaboration and project management), OSF Registries (for pre-registration of studies), and OSF Preprints (for sharing pre-publication research).
• Community Support: Free users benefit from extensive OSF user guides, tutorials, and community forums for assistance and troubleshooting.
• Compliance: The platform operates with GDPR compliance, ensuring data protection for users within the European Union, which is a key consideration for many academic institutions and researchers, as detailed by Microsoft's GDPR guide.

These features enable researchers to manage the entire lifecycle of a research project, from planning and data collection to analysis, publication, and archiving, all within an open and collaborative environment. The free tier aims to remove financial barriers for individual researchers, allowing them to engage fully with open science practices without requiring institutional subscriptions.

Real-world cost examples

Given OSF's bifurcated pricing model—free for individuals and custom for institutions—real-world cost examples diverge significantly based on the user type.

Individual Researcher Scenario (Free Tier)

A Ph.D. student is conducting a multi-year qualitative study involving interviews and survey data. They use OSF to:

• Manage Project Files: Store interview transcripts (private project), survey instruments, and coding schemes. They have two private projects, each staying within the 5GB private storage limit.
• Collaborate: Invite their supervisor and a research assistant to an OSF project to collaboratively develop protocols and analyze data.
• Pre-register Study: Use OSF Registries to pre-register their study design, hypotheses, and analysis plan before data collection begins, enhancing transparency.
• Share Preprints: Upload a draft manuscript to OSF Preprints for early feedback before journal submission.
• Archive Data: Make anonymized data and analysis scripts publicly available upon publication.

Total Cost: $0.00. The student leverages all core OSF functionalities without incurring any direct costs, demonstrating the extensive utility of the free tier for academic research.

University Research Department Scenario (OSF Institutions)

A large university's Faculty of Social Sciences wants to promote open science practices among its 500 researchers (faculty, post-docs, and graduate students). They decide to implement OSF Institutions to:

• Provide Centralized Access: Integrate OSF with the university's single sign-on (SSO) system, allowing researchers to log in with their existing university credentials, as discussed in Google's SSO overview.
• Brand OSF Instances: Customize the OSF interface with the university's logo and branding, creating a cohesive institutional presence.
• Monitor Compliance: Use institutional dashboards to track pre-registration rates and data sharing compliance across departments, aligning with funder mandates.
• Integrate with Institutional Repository: Streamline the deposit of final research outputs from OSF projects directly into the university's long-term digital repository.
• Offer Enhanced Support: Provide dedicated support channels for their researchers, backed by OSF's institutional support team.
• Negotiate Increased Storage: Secure a broader agreement for cloud storage, beyond the default 5GB per private project, to accommodate large datasets from specific research groups.

Total Cost: Custom enterprise quote. The university would engage directly with the Center for Open Science for a proposal. The annual cost would likely be a five- or six-figure sum, depending on the scale of the institution, the complexity of integrations, and the level of dedicated support and custom features required. This cost covers the specialized administrative tools, technical integrations, and personalized support that go beyond the capabilities of the individual free tier.

How the pricing compares

When comparing Open Science Framework's pricing to alternatives, it is crucial to distinguish between platforms offering similar services for individual researchers and those targeting institutional clients.

Comparison for Individual Researchers

For individuals, OSF's free tier is highly competitive due to its comprehensive features:

• Zenodo: Zenodo, hosted by CERN, offers free, open access repository services for all research outputs. It provides 50GB of storage per record (upload), with the possibility to request more for specific use cases. While Zenodo excels as a repository, OSF offers more integrated project management and pre-registration tools alongside data archiving. Both are free for core use.
• Figshare: Figshare offers a free public account with 20GB of private storage. For institutional users, Figshare provides paid plans that include enhanced branding, administrative tools, and integrations, similar to OSF Institutions. The free storage limit for private content is higher on Figshare for a single user, but OSF's 5GB per project allows for more distributed private storage across multiple projects.
• Dataverse: Dataverse is open-source software that institutions can host themselves or utilize cloud-hosted instances. While the software itself is free, hosting and maintaining a Dataverse instance incurs infrastructure and administrative costs for institutions. Individual researchers typically access Dataverse through an institutional instance, meaning their direct cost is usually zero, but the underlying institutional investment is significant.

In this segment, OSF, Zenodo, and Figshare all offer robust free options for individual researchers, making them highly accessible. OSF's strength lies in its integrated project management and pre-registration capabilities alongside data archiving.

Comparison for Institutions

For institutional clients, the comparison shifts to feature sets, integration capabilities, and the custom pricing models:

• OSF Institutions (Custom Pricing): Offers a comprehensive platform for research lifecycle management, strong emphasis on open science workflows, and tailored integrations. The custom pricing ensures institutions only pay for the specific features and scale they require.
• Figshare for Institutions (Paid Plans): Provides institutional repositories, data publishing tools, and research data management solutions. Figshare's institutional plans are also custom, focusing on data stewardship, discoverability, and compliance.
• Dataverse (Self-hosted or Cloud Services): Institutions deploying Dataverse incur costs for server infrastructure, IT support, and potentially developer customization. Third-party cloud hosting providers may offer managed Dataverse services for a fee. The cost model here is less about a SaaS subscription and more about infrastructure and maintenance.
• Commercial Research Information Management Systems (e.g., Pure, Converis): These systems, while broader in scope (often including faculty profiles, grant management, and impact assessment), typically have much higher licensing and implementation costs. They often integrate with data repositories but do not provide the same integrated project workspace as OSF.

OSF Institutions competes by offering a dedicated platform for collaborative open science workflows and comprehensive data management, specifically aligning with transparency and reproducibility mandates. Its custom enterprise pricing ensures flexibility, positioning it as a strong contender against other institutional solutions that might be more narrowly focused or significantly more expensive due to broader feature sets not directly related to research project management and open data sharing.