Output It Forward (OIF)

Verifying whether a published article actually shares its underlying data still depends on either slow manual inspection or computational pipelines that assume programming expertise and dedicated infrastructure. Neither option fits well into the everyday workflow of a researcher, reviewer, editor, or data curator who simply wants to know, while reading an article, whether and where its data are available.

Output It Forward (OIF) is a Google Chrome extension I developed to address this gap. It scans both HTML journal pages and PDF documents for open science phrases, plain-text URLs, and known repository links, and displays the results in a structured popup. Detections accumulate across browsing sessions and can be exported as a single CSV file, making systematic open data monitoring practical without any programming required.

OIF is freely available on the Chrome Web Store, and its source code is openly available on GitHub, with a community contribution model for extending coverage across disciplines.

These figures illustrate how OIF works in practice. Once activated on an article, the extension scans the text for open science phrases, plain-text URLs, and known repository links, and displays the results in a structured popup. The popup is organized into four sections: candidate data availability sentences extracted directly from the article, repository tokens (e.g., OSF, Zenodo, Figshare), detected open science phrases as clickable links that scroll to their location in the text, and all plain-text URLs found on the page. Detections accumulate across browsing sessions and can be exported as a single CSV file.