University of Maryland Baltimore has partnered with OSF, meaning that you can sign in using your institutional credentials. When you go to log in, select Sign in via institution, then choose University of Maryland, Baltimore from the drop-down menu on the next page.  

You will then be prompted to log in using your UMID and password. These will be the same credentials used for other accounts tied to your UMID.

OSF assets are organized into different collections. The most versatile collections are projects which can be used to publicly or privately store and describe files. Other collection types include registrations and preprints, which are discussed elsewhere. This section covers the basics of setting up a project, which are good to know regardless of your OSF use case. 

To create a project, select My Projects from the menu at the top of the screen, which will take you to a list of all the collections on which you are a contributor. When you log into OSF for the first time, this section will likely be empty. To create your first project, click the Create Project button in the upper righthand corner of the page. 

You will then be prompted to enter some information about your new project. Click the More button for extra options.

Fill in the following fields:

• Title: Assign a descriptive but brief title for your project. (This can be changed later.)
• Affiliation: If you have logged into OSF using your institutional credentials, your project will be affiliated with your institution by default. It is recommended that you keep this setting to help your institution maintain accurate usage data and enhance the discoverability of your project.
• Storage location: Choose the geographic location where the contents of your project will be hosted. Generally, the United States will suffice as a storage location, but if your project is funded by a non-US organization or you are collaborating with non-US researchers, check with them to see if they require files to be stored in another country. NOTE: You cannot change your storage location after your project has been created.
• Description: Write a brief description for your project. (This can be changed later.)
• Template: If you have other projects in OSF, you can use one of them as a template, which will copy the folder structure of the project, but not its files.   

Click Create, and then Go to new project to see the overview page for your project. 

Watch the video below or scroll down for a guide to the major features of an OSF project.

This section covers the basic features of your project space. The elements listed below are numbered to match their location in the image above.

1. Contributors: The list of contributors to your project.
2. Date created and last updated: These fields update automatically and cannot be manually changed. 
3. Category: The default category is Project, but you can change it to another category (such as Analysis, Data, or Methods and Measures) to help organize your project and components. This does not change anything about the layout but serves as a visual identifier. (Note: If your project is public, this section of the project overview will also include an option to assign a DOI to your project, giving it a persistent identifier.) 
4. Description: The description you set for your project when you created it. Double-click on the description to edit it.
5. License: A license is an important feature that all shared projects should have so that others know how they are allowed to reuse elements of the project. The drop-down menu provides several popular open licenses for scholarly work and software. If the license you want is not listed, you can select "Other" and upload the appropriate license to your file directory. 
6. Wiki: A space to provide a more robust description for your project or any files that are key to understanding and using the project. Utilizing the Wiki is covered in more detail in the use cases on the other pages of this guide.
7. Files:  This is the heart of your project space where you can upload, view, and organize your project files. Each project comes with default OSF storage, but you can also connect a number of popular third-party apps. For example, if you have code stored in GitHub, documents in Google Drive, and citations in Zotero, these can all be connected and integrated with your OSF project. Click on the storage space (such as OSF Storage) to access a menu to upload, download, or move files across folders.
8. Privacy and sharing settings: By default, all projects are private, but you can adjust the settings here to make it public. While you can change it back to private from public, it’s important to remember that items may be cached by search engines while the project is public, and so it may not be possible to completely make your project private again. For this reason you should keep your project private until you are sure you are ready to share it. 
9. Citation:  The citation is automatically generated in major citation styles based on your contributor list. You can use the dropdown to select additional styles, or you can write your own citation in the citation edit dialog.
10. Components:  A component is a sub-project. It has its own Wiki space and file storage, privacy settings, tags, and contributors. Components can be used to give each collaborator their own project space, and to separate different kinds of material, like code, methods, and analysis, especially if you want to make some parts of your project public, while keeping other parts private.
11. Tags: Adding tags improves the discoverability of your project if you make it public. 
12. Recent Activity: A feed that automatically updates with changes made by any project contributors.

While the project overview page enables you to access all major elements of your project, the menu bar at the top of your project also provides some additional options:

• Metadata gathers all your project metadata in one place. Most of these elements, such as Title, Description, and Tags, can be edited from the project overview, but there are some additional categories, including Resource Information and Funding/Support Information.
• Files provides an alternate view of the files associated with your project.
• Wiki allows you to edit the Wiki information that appears on the project overview.
• Analytics (available for public projects only) allow you to track metrics related to your project, including total visits, top referrers, and forks created by other users. 
• Registrations tracks the status of any registrations associated with your project. For more information, see the registration documentation created by OSF.
• Contributors lists all current contributors to your project and allows you to add new ones (if you are an administrator). New contributors can be given administrative, read and write, or read only privileges. On this page, you can also create a view-only link to share your project with someone without an OSF account. (View-only links are useful for sharing your project with a reviewer before it is ready for publication.)
• Add-ons allow you to link your OSF project to other service providers.
• Settings gives you  control over additional elements of your project, such as enabling or disabling public comments, adjusting email notifications for updates to the project, and deleting the project.