openscience

The open-source AI workbench for scientific research.

Give it a goal. It reads the literature, writes and runs the code, runs the experiments, and writes up what it found, with every step on the record.

Download · Quickstart · Documentation · Changelog · Contributing

What it is

OpenScience is a research agent with a workbench around it. You describe the task in plain language; it plans, gathers evidence, runs code and experiments, and hands back results you can check. It runs as a desktop app, a browser workspace, or a terminal command, on your machine, against your files.

It is built for the parts of research that are real work but not the idea: pulling and cleaning data, reproducing a claim, sweeping a parameter, drafting the methods section, checking a reference. You keep the idea and the judgment.

• Every step is visible. A turn reads as what happened: what it thought, what it searched, what it ran, what it wrote, then the answer. Nothing runs that you cannot see afterwards.
• Real tools, real files. Shell, Python and R kernels, notebooks, a file system with explicit read and write grants, remote compute when a laptop is not enough.
• Scientific reach. Hundreds of bundled skills across biology, chemistry, physics, ML and data engineering, plus connectors to databases such as ChEMBL, UniProt, PubMed and arXiv.
• Delegation when it helps. The lead agent can hand bounded work to workers, in parallel, and keeps the synthesis and the final say.
• Your model, your terms. Bring your own API keys, sign in to a supported provider, run a local model, or use Ace, the managed pay-as-you-go option.

Install

Desktop app. Download for macOS, Windows or Linux. It updates itself.

Command line and browser workspace.

npm install -g @synsci/openscience
openscience

Or run it without installing:

npx synsci

Or with the standalone installer on macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://openscience.sh/install | bash

Then open Customize → Models and connect a provider, or from the terminal:

openscience keys add        # your own API key
openscience local add       # Ollama, LM Studio, or another local endpoint

The installation guide covers platform details, updates and uninstalling.

First task

Open a project folder and describe the work:

openscience ~/research/my-project

Inspect data/samples.csv for missing values and inconsistent labels.
Keep the original data unchanged. Save a quality report and a plot
in results/, with the code needed to reproduce them.

Start with /plan when you want to agree on the method first. For a single turn from a script or a pipeline:

openscience run "Review the analysis plan in this project"
openscience run --continue "Suggest checks for the assumptions you identified"

Review sources, assumptions, code and outputs before relying on a scientific conclusion. The agent shows you what it did so that you can.

What you can do

A skill describes a procedure; it does not mean every tool or service it references is installed. Check availability in Customize before a substantial task.

NVIDIA BioNeMo

OpenScience ships ten bring-your-own-key adapters for NVIDIA BioNeMo NIM endpoints: Boltz-2, DiffDock, Evo 2, GenMol, MolMIM, MSA Search, OpenFold2, OpenFold3, ProteinMPNN and RFdiffusion. Each has a strict request schema, one approval per dispatch, and hashed artifacts written into the session; they are marked experimental and need your own NVIDIA API key under NVIDIA's service terms. The protein-binder-design skill is adapted from the NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit (CC-BY-4.0 skills, Apache-2.0 code), pinned at commit 0e67a61. See Scientific tools and Service credentials.

How it works

your request
  → Research agent plans, then works step by step
      → tools: shell, Python/R kernels, files, search, connectors, compute
      → workers for bounded parallel tasks (explore, general, and five domain specialists)
  → answer, with the trace and the files it produced

• Permissions. Choose how much to ask: always, only for risky actions, or full access. Network commands ask once per destination host. Files outside the project are read or written only with an explicit grant.
• Working folder. A conversation works in the project's connected folder; caches and throwaway output stay in a per-session scratch space.
• Publishing stays with you. git push, releases and uploads run from the lead session with this machine's own GitHub and Hugging Face logins; no token is ever asked for in chat.

The capability map, Explore tools and the skills directory list what is available and how to set it up.

Benchmarks

GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6 Sol on Harbor, with each benchmark's native environments, verifiers and judge. The results, with the trace of every counted trial, are in benchmarks-openscience.

Model access

Ace has no subscription. Direct provider routes add no fee; models served through OpenRouter include its funding fee (5.5% by default), already counted in the displayed rate. The card processing fee is shown at checkout.

First-run setup asks you to sign in to an OpenScience account; headless openscience run does not. Model usage through your own keys or a local model is never charged to an Ace Wallet. Details are in Models, Local models and Pricing.

Documentation