Producing a policy brief on open science hardware to engage technology transfer offices: an account from the Gathering for Open Science Hardware

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ContextOpen science hardware (OScH) can be broadly described as a movement to remove barriers to the design, production and access to research instruments and experimental setups, stretching towards recipes for reagents and the sharing of research materials such as biological samples. From a governance perspective, it stands in a critical position among the many branches of the Open Science tree (Albagli et al., 2015) for the following reasons: (1) It deals most directly with regulatory systems that transcend the academic world, such as safety and sanitary regulations and patent law. (2) In this last case, it touches regulation that is at the basis of some large innovation systems, such as the pharmaceutical and gadget industries (3) It exposes hard to circumvent inequalities and inefficiencies, such as the reproducibility of physical experiments and the non-vanishing costs associated with scientific hardware and materials, even in a digital environment.(Maia Chagas, 2018). This suggests that OScH initiatives are an interesting arena of governance innovation, more so as, beyond their appartenance to Open Science, they are rich in challenges that can be related to goals of Sustainable Development and Responsible Research and Innovation.The OScH movement today engages a large number of researchers, embracing journals such as PLOS and Sensors and having sprung dedicated publications such as the Journal of Open Hardware and HardwareX. Within the movement, the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) is a seminal and ever leading collective (Gibney, 2016), a consolidation of communities from around the globe who had long been involved in the study, production and advocacy of OScH. GOSH was constituted during a 2016 homonymous event that took place at CERN (Dosemagen et al., 2017), and its foundational document, which one may consider its first governance instrument, is the GOSH Manifesto (GOSH Community, 2016). Ever since, it has engaged in many other levels of coordination by producing a roadmap (GOSH Community, 2017), structuring a governance working group, a soon-to-be elected community council, a dedicated NGO to receive a significant grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, and regional networks such as "reGOSH" in Latin America. One also finds in their forum1, where the life of the network develops, a major section called Community Governance. It is also worth noting, however unsurprising, that the OScH movement has strong links to the larger Open Hardware movement and to maker culture.ContributionThis paper concerns the ongoing process of engagement between GOSH and technology transfer offices (TTOs) and similar departments inside research institutions. Although most GOSH members work within these institutions, they rarely engage their innovation departments formally, in good measure due to a perceived lack of understanding of OScH values, processes and value propositions. However, it is known, and has been clearly identified in the case of Open Hardware responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, that institutional support and dealing with regulations will be critical for the long term and large scale success of OScH (Stirling & Bowman, 2021). Therefore, a decision has been taken for GOSH to convene and expand its community to tackle the production of a policy brief directed at TTOs, to be followed by an engagement campaign. This process is particularly interesting because (1) it can be seen as a very early form of direct, collective and mission oriented engagement between GOSH and institutional governance systems, (2) it takes place as the governance of GOSH itself takes form, facilitating the appearance of influential feedback loops, and (3) as per the aforementioned roadmap, it will be followed by other similar efforts directed at research funders and other institutional governance bodies inside and outside academia. The paper intends to report on the specific process of producing this particular document, focusing on the sources of action, the "matters of concern" (Callon & Rabeharisoa, 2008), and the governance cultures at play, as well as on how participants embody diversity across these dimensions, in order to understand the interplay, respectively, between capital, values and practices of power within the organization. And, to the extent that GOSH carries a democratizing promise, to serve as a reflexive resource for its fulfillment.