Introducing the Open Exchange Architecture

Scientific communication is still largely confined to a paper-shaped box: static PDFs that privilege narrative over utility, while the data, code, protocols, and computation that underpin modern research are pushed into hard-to-access supplements. In this talk, Rowan Cockett introduces the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA), an emerging, community-driven standard designed to break research out of that container. OXA rethinks scientific content as modular, composable components—figures, notebooks, methods, data, and computations—that can be directly referenced, reused, and integrated across the open science ecosystem. Grounded in recent cross-community collaboration and informed by decades of work on authoring, publishing, and reproducible research, OXA aims to shift open science from a focus on access and reading toward one centered on reuse, interoperability, and new modes of discovery—human and machine alike.