Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is widely acknowledged as one of the most serious public health threats facing the world. The problem may have been worsened by the overuse of antibiotics to treat COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. Unfortunately, those antibiotics rendered ineffective by resistance are not being replaced at the rate that society needs. Of the 43 antibiotics in clinical development as of December 2020, only six have the requisite activity against World Health Organization (WHO) critical or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urgent pathogens, and only ten represent a novel class or target. This shortfall is primarily due to the high cost of antibiotic development and the challenges of creating a market structure in which novel antibiotics are both stewarded responsibly and made profitable. In this environment, an open source model for drug discovery can offer several advantages. A project adopting this approach lacks secrecy: it takes place publicly in real time, with all communication in the public domain, and is not based on a patent model. Such an approach allows for the recruitment of diverse scientific expertise (freedom to operate is clearly delineated through the use of a Creative Commons licence), reduces or eliminates unproductive duplication of effort and enables a competitive yet collaborative assessment of strategies to solve a problem. While such a model has been previously applied to other discovery projects towards, for example, antimalarials () and antifungals, 8 () the project described herein is an example of an open source drug discovery framework applied to the challenge of novel antibiotic discovery.