OpenScience, an Apache 2.0–licensed, model‑agnostic AI workbench from Synthetic Sciences, offers an open‑source alternative to proprietary tools like Anthropic’s Claude Science. Released as a self‑hosted solution, it lets researchers run the full AI‑assisted scientific loop—literature review, hypothesis formation, coding, experimentation, analysis, and write‑up—on their own infrastructure while keeping data and models under their control.
Model‑agnostic and extensible by design, OpenScience routes per‑request across any frontier or open‑weight model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, local fine‑tunes, etc.). It ships with 250+ editable skills and dozens of integrated scientific databases, including UniProt, PDB, ChEMBL, arXiv, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar. The system runs in a browser‑based workspace with an interactive terminal, file tree, inline visualizations of molecules/proteins, and session provenance saved locally.
Compared with Claude Science, OpenScience trades curated polish for transparency: it is open source, supports arbitrary model selection, runs on user infrastructure, and avoids vendor‑lock‑in, while Claude Science provides a hardened, subscription‑based product with curated integrations. Common use cases include ML hyperparameter/lora experiments, computational biology target analysis, cheminformatics screening, and side‑by‑side model comparisons on private data.
The project emphasizes openness, auditability, and extensibility through LSP, MCP servers, plugins, and a TypeScript SDK, though it places responsibility for security, isolation, and cost management on the operator—recommending containerized deployments and careful permission management. A browser based simulator illustrates the research loop interactively, demonstrating how model choices, skills, and database queries map into concrete research steps.
Synthetic Sciences. “OpenScience: An open‑source AI workbench for scientific research.” *Marktechpost*, 2026. Available at: https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/03/03/openscience-an-open-source-ai-workbench-for-scientific-research/.
