The Office of Science and Technology Policy Memo on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research (sometimes referred to as the Nelson Memo) has recommended that federal funders collect certain metadata about the results of funded projects, including datasets. While not all federal funding agencies have implemented a metadata requirement, ensuring that your shared research data meets these requirements now will facilitate future compliance and improve the discoverability of your outputs.

This page details how to enhance your OSF project's metadata with the information recommended by the OSTP Memo, including:

• All author and co-author names, affiliations, and sources of funding, referencing digital persistent identifiers
• Date of publication
• A unique digital persistent identifier for the resource

Some of the metadata referenced below includes persistent identifiers. Persistent Identifiers (PIDS) are a special type of metadata maintained by registry organizations. They can be applied to a wide variety of entities in scholarship:

Including PIDs in your research output's metadata is important for two reasons:

1. PIDs are unique to a single entity and remove ambiguity. For example, if two researchers share the same name but include their ORCID IDs with their publications, then it will always be possible to know which researcher created which outputs.
2. PIDs always refer to their resource, even if the resource itself changes its digital location. For example, if an article moves to a new repository, its DOI can be updated to refer to its new location, even if its former one is no longer accessible. The OSF FAQ provides information on updating your DOI if your project changes location.

Regardless of your project type, you should be sure to include metadata at the project level, which you can do by clicking the Metadata tab from your project page.

Editable Categories from the Metadata Tab

When sharing your project publicly, be sure to fill out the following fields at a minimum:

• Description: This may be an adapted version of your project's abstract.
• Contributors: Include all researchers as contributors on the project so that they are included in the metadata, even if they are not responsible for uploading any data to OSF. If your contributors do not have OSF accounts, you can add them as unregistered contributors.(They can then claim their account by following these instructions.)
• Resource Type: If sharing research data, select "Dataset" from the dropdown. Otherwise, select the most appropriate description. (These options come from the DataCite schema of resource types.)
• Resource Language: Only one language can be selected, so choose the predominant language of your project.
• Funding/Support Information: Select your funder from the dropdown menu, then include the award name, URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), and number, if applicable. OSF pulls its list of funders from the Crossref Open Funder Registry. If you do not see your funder's name come up when you search for it, try searching for it on Crossref in case it is listed under a slightly different name. Note: You can include multiple funders if needed.

Metadata Editable from the Project Overview

Two categories can be changed manually but must be done from the project overview page:

• License: A license is important because it lets others clearly know how they are permitted to reuse your data and other research outputs. See the Assign Your Data a License section of the Research Data Sharing page for guidance on which license to select. 
• Tags: Though not an essential inclusion, tags can help increase the discoverability of your project on OSF. Tags can be entered freely on the project overview page but will be most useful when they match common search terms relevant to your research.

Fixed Metadata

The following metadata categories are automatically assigned to your project and cannot be changed:

• Affiliated institutions: If you created your OSF account through your research institution and chose to affiliate your project with that institution when you created it, it will be listed here. Otherwise, it will be blank. You cannot change or add affiliated institutions after creating a project.
• Data Created and Date Modified: These dates are automatically set. The Date Modified will update automatically as you make changes to your project.

In addition the adding metadata for your project as a whole, you can also apply metadata to individual project files. Whether or not this is necessary will depend on many factors, including the complexity, type, and number of the files you are sharing. 

To start editing, select a file from your project's overview page, or go to the Files tab and select a file from there. Then click on the pencil icon next to the File Metadata heading.

The categories of metadata you can control for a file are more limited than for a project as a whole. They include:

• Title: This field is optional, but consider using the name of the file.
• Description: A description of the file contents. While good to include here, be sure to also include descriptions of your files in a README document so that users who download your data will still have file documentation on hand.
• Resource Type: Since these types are pulled from the DataCite schema, they may not perfectly fit each of your files. If necessary, select a more general resource type, such as Text or Image.
• Resource Language: As with the project, select the predominant language of the resource. 

Globally Unique Identifiers for Files

Although not editable, the URL for each file on OSF is a globally unique identifier, or GUID. The URL will always direct to the file, even if it has been moved to a new place in the folder structure or if a new version is uploaded. If the file is deleted or hidden, users will be directed to a page containing some metadata, including the file name, the user who deleted the file, and timestamp of file deletion.

A sample GUID

Since OSF does not allow creating a DOI for an individual file, you can leverage their GUIDs instead. For example, if you need to direct a user to an individual file in your project, copy the GUID for that file directly, rather than providing a link to the project as a whole.