Open Science Index: a searchable directory of open source scientific software

Finding the right open source scientific software for a research problem is harder than it should be. The number of tools has exploded over the last few years, well beyond biotech, and they sit scattered across separate indices and GitHub lists that change constantly. There is rarely an easy way to tell which tools are still maintained and which have been abandoned.

We started an internal tracker so we could always build on the latest tools. That tracker became Open Science Index.

It is now live, with 6,720 resources indexed at the time of writing and updated daily: a single cross-domain directory of open source scientific software, AI models, datasets, and research resources spanning every scientific field. You can search it, filter it, and submit your own tools.

The open science ecosystem is fragmented

Thousands of valuable tools exist across biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and earth science. Finding the right one usually means jumping between dozens of separate registries, outdated awesome lists, and domain-specific sites that rarely connect to one another.

Open source AI models tend to live on Hugging Face, organized by machine learning task rather than by scientific application. A model that predicts protein structure and a model that classifies microscopy images are filed under “image segmentation” and “token classification,” which tells a biologist almost nothing. Traditional bioinformatics tools sit in places like bio.tools or lie scattered across GitHub. Databases live somewhere else again.

The result is that researchers spend hours hunting for, evaluating, and comparing tools that should be discoverable in a single search.

What you can search

Open Science Index is organized by scientific application rather than by software category, so you can start from the problem instead of the tech stack: