OpenDraft — Autonomous Agents

OpenDraft is an open-source Python engine that generates source-grounded research drafts using 19 specialized AI agents. It solves the problem of hallucinated or unverifiable citations by confirming each DOI against multiple scholarly databases. It is for researchers, graduate students, and developers who need long-form academic drafts with verified citations.

academic-papers academic-writing ai-agents ai-writing chatgpt-alternative citation-verification dissertation docx-export

🐙 View on GitHub ↗ 🌐 Website 📦 Install

OpenDraft demo — 🎞️ Demo from the project README

✨ Key features

Citations confirmed against CrossRef, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar
19 specialized AI agents for research, writing, citation, polish
Generates long-form drafts (10k-20k+ words) in 10-20 minutes
Exports to PDF, DOCX, and LaTeX
Supports 57+ languages including English, Spanish, Chinese
Includes TL;DR and digest tools for quick paper summaries

🎯 Use cases

Drafting literature reviews with verified citations
Creating structured research paper first drafts
Generating thesis or dissertation draft chapters
Building reproducible research-agent pipelines for custom workflows

📦 Installation

🧰 Requirements: Python environment; requires API keys for AI models (e.g., Gemini, Claude) and optionally for scholarly databases.

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/federicodeponte/opendraft.git
cd opendraft

Install dependencies (recommended: use a virtual environment)

pip install -r requirements.txt

🚀 Usage

Run OpenDraft with a research prompt

opendraft run "Your research topic here"

Example: Generate a TL;DR summary of a paper

opendraft tldr paper.pdf

⚠️ Good to know

OpenDraft is not for generating final papers or bypassing peer review; it requires human review and is not an autonomous author. Citation verification does not guarantee claim support, and claim-level verification is based on abstracts only.

❓ FAQ

How does OpenDraft verify citations?

By default, a citation is kept only if its DOI is held by at least two of CrossRef, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar. Each citation records which databases confirmed it.

What output formats are supported?

OpenDraft can export drafts to PDF, Microsoft Word (.docx), and LaTeX source.

What is the cost per draft?

API cost per draft ranges from ~$0.35 (Gemini Flash) to ~$3.00 (Claude Opus), depending on the model used.

Can I use OpenDraft for free?

Yes, OpenDraft is free and open source under the MIT license. You only need to provide your own API keys for AI models.

📊 Repository

GitHub github.com/federicodeponte/opendraft

Stars★ 400

Forks🍴 75

Open issues🐛 20

Last commit🕒 Sep 1, 2026

Created📅 Oct 2025

Language💻 Python

License⚖️ MIT

Websiteopenpaper.dev?utm_source=github&utm_medium=repo_about&utm_campaign=opendraft

Topics academic-papers academic-writing ai-agents ai-writing chatgpt-alternative citation-verification dissertation docx-export literature-review llm multi-agent open-source

🤖 Overview, features, install steps and FAQ were generated from the project's README on Sep 4, 2026. Always check the original source before running commands.