Open Science Crowdsourcing Platform OpenDiscovery Launches: 3,400 Researchers Worldwide Collaborate on New Material Discovery in a Single AI Framework

Open Science Crowdsourcing Platform OpenDiscovery Launches

On September 15, 2030, the EU-funded open science platform OpenDiscovery officially launched. The platform combines an AI hypothesis generation engine with a distributed experiment verification network, allowing laboratories worldwide to collaboratively advance scientific research within a single framework.

In its first week, 3,400 researchers from 47 countries registered on the platform. The initial 12 collaborative projects span three directions: novel perovskite materials, protein folding inhibitors, and ocean microplastic degradation enzymes. The AI engine automatically generates next-step experiment suggestions based on preliminary data submitted by each laboratory, and researchers can choose to accept or modify these suggestions.

Martin Schulz, a materials science professor at the Technical University of Berlin and lead of one of the first projects, said the biggest obstacle to traditional research collaboration is non-uniform data formats and communication delays. OpenDiscovery minimizes these frictions through standardized data protocols and AI mediation. "Previously, collaborating with overseas labs on a project required months of back-and-forth emails to align experiment protocols; now AI can generate mutually agreed-upon experiment plans within hours."

The platform's technical architecture is based on open-source projects, with core code hosted on GitHub under the AGPL license. Any institution can deploy its own OpenDiscovery node or participate in global collaboration through public nodes.

OpenDiscovery's operating funds come from joint funding under the EU Horizon Europe program and the European Research Council, totaling approximately 45 million euros. The platform does not charge researchers but requires all collaborative results to be open access within 6 months of publication.