Towards FAIR Principles for Open Hardware

Abstract

The lack of scientific openness is identified as one of the key challenges of computational reproducibility. In addition to Open Data, Free and Open-source Software (FOSS) and Open Hardware (OH) can address this challenge by introducing open policies, standards, and recommendations. However, while both FOSS and OH are free to use, study, modify, and redistribute, there are significant differences in sharing and reusing these artifacts. FOSS is increasingly supported with software repositories, but support for OH is lacking, potentially due to the complexity of its digital format and licensing. This paper proposes leveraging FAIR principles to make OH findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. We define what FAIR means for OH, how it differs from FOSS, and present examples of unique demands. Also, we evaluate dissemination platforms currently used for OH and provide recommendations.

Professors want to share: preliminary survey results on establishing open-source-endowed professorships

“…Because these forms of compensation were found most common across all respondents irrespective of academic discipline, terms for OS-endowed professorships should be offered uniform to all disciplines, including social sciences and humanities. In addition, there has been a recent surge in interest observed in the social aspects of open hardware design (Bonvoisin et al 2021;Carvalho et al 2021;Miljković et al 2021;Shang 2022).…”