From the source
Hugging Face is launching Project ProtoStar, an initiative with universities, research organizations and the open science community to make publicly funded scientific datasets, models and code easier to discover and reuse for AI research.
- Founding partners include Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and The George Washington University, working through the Open Forum for AI, alongside the Astera Institute, Hugging Face as infrastructure partner, and the Open Research Community Accelerator as community partner.
- The first open challenge, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, opens on November 2.
- The initiative responds to a gap: research is increasingly required to be shared publicly, but scientific artifacts are often scattered across incompatible systems, stored in legacy formats, or released without the documentation, metadata and provenance needed to reuse them.
- Hugging Face says it hosts more than 17,000 public datasets across core scientific domains, approaching 29,000 when medicine and mathematics are included, and that researchers shared more than three times as many new science datasets in the first nine months of 2026 as in the same period of 2025.
