An empirical assessment of Open Hardware practices in the academic community and their policy implications

Résumé En

Open Science Hardware (OSH) is a term for the practice of sharing, as open-source, the material means of science: the reproducible designs, assembly and operation instructions of research hardware, plus any software they may depend on. A practice that spans lab-grade pipettes, rotators, scales, sensors, microscopes, beams, and imaging devices, but may also include cell lines, reagents, genetic parts, and even laboratory automation systems, diagnostic equipment, small satellites and components of particle accelerators (Pearce, 2013; Ravindran, 2020). Proponents of OSH articulate promises of better science and greater and more positive societal impacts, achieved through facilitated collaboration, higher replicability, reduced efforts, inclusion and more equitable research capacity, freedom to innovate, customise and appropriate technologies, and lower risks of monopolistic and lock-in conditions (Arancio et al., 2022; Chagas, 2018). In the open hardware model, a critical and early condition for such value co-creation are the qualities of the documentation of designs published (Bonvoisin et al., 2017). In the case of OSH, this concerns academic journals and online file repositories that papers refer to: Are they available, complete, and useful to reproduce and build on existing work? Are legal aspects, such as licences, properly dealt with? Is there an infrastructure for collaboration deployed? The answers to these questions are, thus, both informative of actual research practices and needs, and required to reliably connect them to the aforementioned promises, in view of planning, executing, monitoring and evaluating policies to foster OSH. This paper contains two main contributions: I) A qualitative assessment of the co-creation enabling characteristics of open scientific hardware publications, and associated features such as publication venue, allowing us to evaluate their progress in time and in relation to the establishment of standards for sharing open hardware designs. II) A solution to a not uncommon problem with research on bibliographic databases: because OSH is an approach and not a subject of research, usual search strategies in bibliographic databases fail to capture the usage of the indicative term, in our case "open hardware", as it may be absent form title and abstract.