Openand

Openand is an open-source, web-based platform that enables collaborative data sharing, workflow orchestration, and reproducible research across organizations. It provides tools to publish datasets, publish and discover metadata, and run computational tasks in isolated environments, all within a standards-based framework that emphasizes interoperability and privacy.

Openand was initiated by a coalition of researchers, engineers, and civic-tech volunteers in 2019, with the first stable release in 2021. It is governed by a community-driven governance model, with a steering committee and a foundation that coordinates releases, documentation, and incident response. The project uses a permissive license, encouraging external contributions.

Architecture and core components: The platform comprises modular services including identity and access management; a data catalog and metadata hub; a policy engine for access control and data handling; a workflow and compute engine; and a provenance subsystem that captures lineage. A plugin system allows integration with cloud providers, storage systems, notebooks, and external data sources. Workloads can run in containers, and reproducibility is supported through versioned workflows and paired metadata.

Standards and interoperability: Openand emphasizes open formats and interfaces. It supports metadata schemas and vocabularies, RESTful APIs and GraphQL, and aims to align with data privacy and provenance standards to facilitate audit trails.

Reception and use: Institutions in academia, government, and civil society have piloted Openand for collaborative research, data sharing with governance constraints, and open science initiatives. Critics note ongoing concerns about governance, performance at scale, and the learning curve for complex deployments.