This talk is aimed at providing an overview on the ongoing trends in the academic research about OSM. The talk will focus on three among the many OSM-related research works I have recently carried out as a GIS researcher, which concern three main scientific areas. 1) OSM quality assessment – I will present an open source, automated procedure to measure the completeness and positional accuracy of OSM road networks through comparison against authoritative datasets; 2) Analysis of OSM contribution patterns – I will present an analysis comparing 40 world cities to understand the differences in the degree to which the tag recommendations of the OSM Map Features wiki pages are followed; 3) Use of OSM to derive scientific products – I will present an automated procedure to generate detailed and up-to-date Land Use and Land Cover maps from OSM data. My OSM wiki profile lists these academic achievements and all my OSM-related activities.