Registration Templates
A preregistration template is useful because it provides structured guidance on what information to includ, which can improve the rigor and accessibility of your community's plans. Your registry can select any subset of OSF's public registration templates and/or create a custom template that better aligns with the standards and rigor for your community.
Template Structure
All templates follow the same structure: metadata, template sections, and review.
Metadata
Metadata is a standard page across all templates to improve registration discoverability and includes the following information:
- Title
- Description
- Contributors
- Affiliated Institution (if applicable)
- Category
- License
- Subject
- Tags
Supplementary Metadata
Some supplementary metadata can also be added to registrations after they are created. This includes funder information and language. See this help guide to find out more about adding this supplemental metadata.
Template Pages
A page is a collection of questions that a research team answers when submitting a registration. You can have multiple pages, and each page can have multiple sections and questions. This flexible structure allows your community to structure questions in a manner that is most conducive for you.
The registration below has 6 pages, each with their own group of questions.
Review
The Review page shows questions and answers across all pages. This helps contributors review registration response prior to submission and readily see what questions needs further refinement. If any step in the process is missing required information, a warning icon will display.
Custom Templates
Creating a custom registration template allows you to design a process that better fits your community's standards and establishes the level of rigor you want to see. Developing a registration is essentially deciding what questions to ask and structuring a questionnaire.
Custom Template Process
If you decide to develop a custom template, you should plan to go through several rounds of review and testing to ensure a rigorous, apt template is available to the community and that it's presented in a way that's expected and for researchers to answer. The amount of time it takes can vary from weeks to months, depending on the number of edits are needed and the approval process.
You can start your process by using a Google Doc template we have provided to help guide you through the process. Simply duplicate the document and follow the instructions to get started.
A template must contain a few pieces of information:
- Any questions you want to ask, along with introductory text, headings and subheadings, and example answers.
- Some indication of what type of input each element is, particularly the response type you want researchers to enter for questions (e.g. multi-select, short answer, date, etc.). See the next section on Page Elements for the standard types of questions we can support.
- Which questions are required.
Page Elements
Pages are built with any combination of the elements listed below. Each element has their own default formatting, as shown by the picture at the bottom. You can contact us to setup an account on our test server and create a registration with our sample templates to see how the various elements display in OSF.
| Element | Description |
| Page Heading | First title displayed at the top of each page or section of the template. |
| Section Heading | A smaller heading for a group of related questions. |
| Subsection Heading | A sub-heading for a sub-group of related questions. |
| Instructions | Additional instructions to help researchers answer questions. |
| Question | A query for the research team to respond to. |
| Example | Example of an answered question to guide researchers. |
| Paragraph | Additional context or information not associated with a specific question. |
| Multiple choice (radio button) | A question answer type where a researcher may select only one option. |
| Multi-select (checkbox) | A question answer type that allows selecting multiple options. |
| Short or long text answer (text box) | Free text responses to questions |
| File upload | Space for researcher to upload separate files as part of their documentation or question responses. |
Custom Metadata
OSF has a standard metadata template described above. If you wish to add additional metadata to registries, please contact us to discuss options.
Final Steps
Once you feel confident that you have all the template elements you would like, and have reviewed and approved your template with any of your stakeholders, contact us to start the final steps of the process. We will review it for completion and accuracy, and ask any clarifying questions. The template will be placed on a test server for your review. Changes can still be made at this stage if you realize that something in your template didn't transfer the way you intended. Once you are comfortable with the template on the test server, we will make it publicly available on the registry.