Describe your experience with building and working with APIs.
With its HTTP API, COS is facilitating an interoperable services ecosystem. Once a service is connected to the ecosystem, it is also connected to all the other services in the ecosystem. As of April 2017, there were 10 add-ons: ownCloud, GitHub, Dropbox, figshare, Box.com, Dataverse, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Mendeley, and Zotero. There are also third-party products that connect to the add-on ecosystem including: Open Sesame, JASP Stats, and Overleaf. Six others are scheduled to be in production by July 2017 including Dryad, bitbucket, Gitlab, OneDrive, Fedora, DMPTool, and Rmap.
The modular approach minimizes user lock-in to any service. Connecting services makes it easy for end users to integrate the services they use. For example, if a user deposits a preprint on OSF Preprints, they can add datasets to the preprint by storing it on OSF, figshare, Dataverse, Dryad, or any other connected storage solution.
Substantial API documentation facilitates use by others in the developer community. The add-on ecosystem provides a substantial efficiency gain for the community of open science service developers. For example, the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing integrated their computational platform with OSF. By creating a single connection to OSF, they maintain a single connection and have access to 10+ storage solutions. As more repositories or other services are connected to ecosystem, they become available to Notre Dame users immediately and automatically. This also presents an opportunity that preprints at The Commons could eventually become highly reproducible with attached data and code, and cloud-based execution to reproduce findings and figures on the fly.