About OpenScience

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

Much of the work of science depends on having appropriate tools available to analyze experimental data and to interract with theoretical models. Powerful computers are now cheap enough so that significant processing power is within reach of many people. The missing piece of the puzzle is software that lets the scientist choose between models and make sense of his or her observations. That is where the OpenScience project can help.

We currently have 5 interrelated projects:

• Collecting links about and providing a home for Open Source scientific software projects.
• Advocacy for a distributed model of doing scientific research.
• OpenMD, an open implementation of a force-field based molecular dynamics program for use in chemical and biochemical simulations.
• Jmol, an Open Source Java-based molecular dynamics viewer.
• JChemPaint, an Open Source Java-based molecular structure editor.

OpenScience.org is also a place to park a blog for Dan Gezelter, the director of the project. He’s a chemistry professor at Notre Dame who studies theoretical and computational chemistry. He’s also the original author of Jmol, and the leader of the OpenMD development group.