What’s new here

OpenResearch takes the coding agent workspace pattern and bends it toward scientific research. The key addition is literature grounding: agents can query alphaXiv, bioRxiv, and PubMed before forming hypotheses. Every experiment run gets written to a local SQL database with its logs, code, and artifacts, so agents can read past results before deciding what to try next.

What it does

OpenResearch is a desktop app (macOS, Windows beta, Linux) that acts as a harness and workspace for research agents. You point it at a coding agent, Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, or Google Antigravity, and it adds three layers on top.

First, literature access: agents can search alphaXiv, bioRxiv, and PubMed to ground their hypotheses in existing work. Second, flexible compute: experiments can run locally, over SSH, on Slurm, Kubernetes, Modal, Tinker, Ray, Hugging Face Jobs, or managed OpenResearch cloud. Third, an experiment store: every run is recorded in a local SQL database on your machine, with logs and artifacts kept under your control.

You can also use a local model with OpenCode through LM Studio, oMLX, Ollama, or a custom endpoint.

There is also a CLI (orx) for users who prefer the terminal. orx up opens a local dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:4791.

Who it’s for

Researchers and engineers who already use AI coding agents and want to apply them to hypothesis-driven, experiment-heavy work: ML researchers, computational scientists, or anyone running iterative experiments where knowing what you already tried matters.

Try it

Download the desktop app for your platform from the releases page, or install the CLI on macOS or Linux:

curl -LsSf https://openresearch.sh/install.sh | sh
orx up

orx up opens the local dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:4791. On managed Macs, the signed desktop app is the safer path since the CLI binary is not yet signed.

How mature is it

Released June 2026, currently at v0.2.18 (tagged 2026-10-09). At least 100 releases in that window, 17 contributors, and 100+ commits in the last 90 days. 6,846 stars and 442 forks. 92 open issues and pull requests. MIT license. Windows support is labeled beta. Active but pre-1.0.