Interoperability & Open Standards

Interoperability is essential for a continuous scientific ecosystem. We work with communities to develop open standards, schemas, and reference architectures that help research outputs move across outputs.

Why it matters
Without shared structure, modular science cannot scale. Standards reduce duplication, improve structure to modernize, and lower the cost interoperability and building and maintaining tools.

What we do

  • Convene group to co-create technical standards

  • Produce, repositories, reference architectures and documentation

  • Support cross-platform pilots

  • Align metadata, identifiers, and versioning practices

  • Documentation and building in public

Open Exchange Architecture

Open Exchange Architecture (OXA) is an open community specification, stewarded by Continuous Science Foundation, a grassroots, community-driven organization that brings together researchers, tool builders, publishers, and standards groups to support modular, continuous ways of publishing research. We welcome contributions from tool builders, publishers, and researchers who want to advance interoperable, open science.

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OXA: The Shift

  • Introducing the Open Exchange Architecture

    ROWAN COCKETT

    Interoperable Evidence, Unbreakable Trust: How OXA Hardwires Attribution into AI Discovery

    Static PDFs hide the data, code, and computation that actually drive modern research. Rowan Cockett introduces OXA, a community-driven standard designed to make scientific evidence modular, composable, and interoperable for both humans and AI.

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  • From Tools to Adoption: A Path to Modular and Interactive Scientific Publishing

    TRACY TEAL & ROWAN COCKETT

    Beyond Consensus: Building the Federated Architecture for Modern Science

    Follow our work as we build in public. After an intense 2.5-day sprint with 25 contributors, we set out to build a federated reference architecture led by openRxiv and Continuous Science Foundation. From live demonstrations to vibe-coding, we documented the foundations of a more interoperable, machine-ready future for science.

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  • The Evolution of Scientific Data Formats

    The Evolution of Scientific Data Formats

    ROWAN COCKETT

    Learnings from ZIP to Zarr on New Standards for Scientific Publishing.

    By treating articles, data, code, and review materials as addressable components, we outline an open exchange architecture that retains the semantic depth of JATS while supporting cloud-native research. We then identify the interoperability conditions needed to make scholarly communication truly streamable.

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