The equivalent of open-source for research?

I am a student graduating with MEng CS degree. During my early college years I found that I could grow by spending my free time by contributing to open-source projects. In the last few years, I became interested in AI research. However, I (apparently) was not experienced enough to land an industry research position or a PhD. Now I am stuck with a standard software development job that I have to do in order to support myself. I want to devote all my free time to doing AI research so that I hopefully manage to enter a PhD program or get a research-related job. However, research is very different from developing open-source code - there are not projects that you can simply join and you often need some guidance from an experienced senior researcher. Any suggestions how I can spend my time best?