Open Science Tools

All Contributors is a bot for projects on GitHub bot for recognizing all contributors to an open-source project. By leaving a comment on an issue or pull request (contributions and discussions within …

ARGOS supports researchers in learning and applying best practices for creating open and FAIR data management plans (DMPs). This includes creating machine actionable DMPs, complying with DMP requireme…

Asta is an online tool dedicated to helping researchers quickly find and summarise literature that matches their research idea. The scholarly research assistant works with a corpus of 108 million scho…

Audacity is a free, open-source audio software for multi-track recordings and for editing audio files. It is available for Linux, macOS and Windows and other operating systems.

B!SON is a free recommendation service for publishing in open-access journals. It can be used directly in a browser and does not require registration. Researchers can enter a manuscript’s title, abstr…

Bookmarks can be managed and publications used jointly with BibSonomy. Content is developed by several users together, so that it thereby functions as a social bookmarking system. BibSonomy offers fle…

Bookdown is an open-source R package that allows writing books, long articles and reports using R Markdown. It supports a variety of programming languages, as well as graphics and interactive applicat…

CFF Init is a user-friendly online tool for creating Citation File Format (CFF) files for software or code. CFF is a simple format that allows researchers and developers to add citable metadata about …

CiteAs makes it easier to cite correctly, not only literature but also a broad range of research output including software and datasets. Just type or paste for instance an URL, a DOI or a search term …

Codeberg is a collaboration platform and a Git-based version control service for open source projects. It offers a privacy-friendly alternative to GitHub and GitLab.

CODECHECK is an initiative in which independent, volunteer “codecheckers” run the code underlying scientific articles and confirm that the calculations and results are indeed reproducible. Researchers…

CORE is a search machine that summarises Open Access publications from different data providers. It contains data from more than 10,000 institutional and specialist repositories and publishers. It is …

The Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) is an international open-source platform for the collaborative creation of data management plans (DMPs) in line with the FAIR principles. Researchers applying for fun…

DataCite is an international initiative to support access to research data. On the one hand, it offers an international search machine for research results in which a search for registered datasets is…

Dataverse is an open source software for setting up a repository for research data, which can be used by journals or research institutions, among others. Researchers can use the general Harvard Datave…

Datavzrd makes it easier to understand and utilise complex data. The tool transforms tables into interactive, visually appealing HTML reports. This allows users to quickly and clearly visualise their …

The DMP tool helps in the preparation of data management plans. Researchers from participating institutions can log in from a corresponding account and then profit from an institutionally adjusted imp…

Docker is an Open Source platform that enables developers to create, deploy and run applications in containers. These containers include all the necessary components, such as code, runtime, system too…

F-UJI is an automated FAIR data assessment tool. It can be used to check the extent to which an individual data record complies with the FAIR principles . After entering a persistent identifier (such …

The FAIR Assessment Tool helps you make your data FAIR. The tool uses an online questionnaire for self-assessment and gives ideas for improving the FAIRness of data. It helps you identify gaps in term…

FAIR-Aware is a knowledge testing tool for FAIR data. Researchers can use it to test their knowledge in order to make their datasets FAIR before uploading them to a data repository. For this purpose, …

GIMP is an open-source image editing programme and thus a counterpart to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. You can use GIMP to create and edit photos and digital graphics. It can be installed under Lin…

GoogleScholar OA Status is a Browser extension for Google Scholar that displays Open Access status labels (Gold, Green, Bronze, Hybrid) directly in search results and links to legally available open v…

Gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) is a cross-platform software package for econometric analysis that runs locally on the computer. It includes all the basic statistical tech…

With H5P you can design interactive elements and exercises for online educational materials via the browser, for instance work/questionnaires or a quiz. You can later integrate these into your own web…

Hypothes.is is an open source software project that aims to collect comments to statements that are accessible online in some kind of form. It filters and ranks these comments in order to evaluate the…

Inciteful is a web-based tool for searching and analysing academic literature. It supports researchers in identifying relevant publications and in better understanding relationships between papers bas…

JabRef helps to research, collect, organise and cite literature. It offers both desktop apps as well as browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox und Edge. JabRef is developed by researchers for research…

Julia VS Code is an extension of the free Open Source development environment Visual Studio Code (VS Code) from Microsoft. It offers a wide range of functions that are specially tailored to the needs …

Jupyter is a very new open source platform that is in the process of becoming the standard platform for the exchange of research results. It supports interactive research data evaluations and scientif…

Jupyter Book is an open-source tool that allows you to create structured, interactive books or documentation from Jupyter Notebooks and Markdown files and publish them as a website. Code blocks (for e…

LiaScript is a Markdown-based project that allows you to create interactive open and interoperable educational content with little or no programming knowledge. For this purpose, LiaScript extends Mark…

LibreOffice has established itself as a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office package. Like many open source projects, the project is financed to a considerable extent by voluntary do…

Local Citation Network shows the relationships between articles in a visual citation network (graph) and is thus a good enhancement for literature search. The starting point is the entry or import of …

LyX combines the advantages of TeX/LaTeX with a graphical user interface. It therefore looks like a word processing programme, but LaTeX is generated in the background. It includes a formula editor an…

On the MIT OpenCourseWare platform, MIT makes teaching materials available for free use, including videos of lectures and seminars (many, however, under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence), slide sets, literature …

MyBinder is a cloud platform that allows Jupyter Notebooks to be started and shared directly from a Git repository. Changes can be transferred back to the GitHub or GitLab repository, hosting right in…

Notepad++ is a text and code editor that offers an advanced alternative to the simple Windows Notepad editor. It runs on Microsoft Windows and supports multiple languages, offers syntax highlighting f…

Using the tool Octopub, developed by the Open Data Institute, you can learn about the future of Open Data publishing, according to the operator. It helps researchers to validate their data, select the…

OERhörnchen allows you to search for OER licensed under Creative Commons with a focus on German-language content. The OERhörnchen is a specially configured Google search that searches OER offerings su…

Open Access Helper (OAHelper) helps you to find legal Open Access copies of scientific publications. It is intended to combat the problem that although there are more than 50 million Open Access versi…

The Open Data Editor (ODE) is a no-code desktop application that makes working with data easier without writing source code. It helps non-technical data practitioners to explore tables, to detect erro…

The Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open source journal administration and publication system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project to expand and improve access to research. Journal…

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free-of-charge network for research materials, an open source project management tool as well as one of the widely used registries for preregistration in the soci…

OpenShot is a free video editor that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

OpenAlex is a freely accessible, interdisciplinary platform for over 480 million academic works, including journal articles, preprints, books, datasets and dissertations from around the world. It is r…

In OSF Preprints, over two million preprints can be searched for or found with the browsing option. Preprints can also be shared. Their impact can be followed with metrics such as the download figures…

The Public License Selector helps in the selection of a suitable licence for the publication of software and data. You are asked a series of questions, which help to filter the number of hits so you c…

PYBOSSA is a web-based platform for running task-based citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Researchers can create projects, define tasks, and make them available to a larger group of contribut…

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing platform built on the conversion software Pandoc. It allows researchers to turn plain text and code into polished papers, slides, websites,…

RDMO (Research Data Management Organiser) supports institutions and researchers in the research data management of their projects. It makes it possible to compile all relevant planning information in …

RStudio Desktop is an Open Source development environment for the programming language R. The software was developed to make working with R easier, thus it offers a variety of tools and functions that…

ShareYourPaper helps researchers to make their research visible and thereby to receive more citations. It makes self-archiving easy by helping to make postprints and/or “author accepted manuscripts” o…

The Social Science Data Editors Template README is a freely available, standardised template that helps researchers create a structured and comprehensive README file for their replication package. Dev…

Software Heritage is a long-term archive for source code that enables researchers to preserve, reference, and cite software as a first-class research output. The platform captures the code along with …

STAPLE (Science Tracking Across the Project LifEspan) is a web-based project management tool for research projects. It supports researchers in structuring projects across the entire research lifecycle…

templatereadme.org is a browser-based editor that helps researchers quickly create a README file for their replication package. Using modular, pre-built sections (for example dataset list, licence, in…

Texmaker is a free LaTeX editor. It runs on various operating systems (Windows, MacOsX, Linux). Texmaker includes many features, thus allowing you to create LaTeX documents within a single application…

TeXStudio is a free LaTeX editor aiming to make writing LaTeX easy and comfortable by integrating numerous features and assistants. The integrated writing environment is available for all major operat…

The Lens is an open platform for the mapping of innovations and useful information on them. In particular, this platform lists almost all patent information in the world as openly accessible, annotata…

Transpose – TRANsparency in Scholarly Publishing for Open Scholarship Evolution is a database that contains journal policies for the three fields Open (Peer) Review, co-reviewing and preprints. Transp…

Unpaywall is an open database in which around 32 million free-of-charge accessible texts are collected. With the help of a browser extension for Chrome, it offers simple and legal access to the Open A…

Wikiversity is a sister project of Wikipedia for the collaborative creation of Open Educational Resources for higher education courses, for teaching in schools, and in adult education and self-study. …

Wispar is a free, open-source app for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux that allows researchers to subscribe to academic journals and topics across all academic disciplines to stay up to date wit…

The World Bank README Generator is a browser-based editor that guides researchers step by step through creating a README file for their replication package. The tool structures documentation according…

Zenodo is a free-of-charge, cross-disciplinary repository that is primarily used for scientific datasets but also for science-related software, publications, reports, presentations, videos and similar…

Zotero is a free-of-charge tool for search and reference management, which helps in the finding, organising, citing and sharing of research results. It has a browser extension. The scope of function i…