Towards national policy for open source hardware research: The case of Finland

Economic savings for scientific free and open source technology: A review

“…There is a clear high ROI for medical open source technologies as well as for the sciences [88] . Similarly, Heikkinen, et al, found that by evaluating the research expenditures for a representative university, Finland alone could expect to save 2.84–27.7 m€ per year by strategic investment in open hardware development for technologies they spend the most funds purchasing [89] . Li et al identified five economic motivations for FOSH companies, which can be applied to nations wanting to capitalize on the opportunity that open source affords: 1) reduce research and development costs as discussed above, 2) reduce recruiting costs using open source records of researcher skills, 3) eliminate patent intellectual property costs, 4) build a platform (e.g.…”

“…The country’s largest current expenditures on scientific hardware should be determined along with the most likely future expenditures. All science-based equipment purchases from internationally-sourced suppliers can be ranked by value so equivalent (or superior) open-source technologies can be identified as either existing or needing to be developed as was done recently in Finland [89] . This enables prioritization of FOSH development for the scientific foci of a specific country or region (e.g.…”

Partially RepRapable automated open source bag valve mask-based ventilator

“…The distributed manufacturing of scientific equipment has been shown to provide custom, high-quality scientific tools for substantially lower costs than conventional proprietary products [42] , [43] , [44] , [45] , [46] . This is because a scientific tool can be developed once and then digitally replicated for approximately the cost of the materials [47] creating enormous distributed value [48] a high return on investment [49] , and the ability to focus investments for strategic national goals [50] , [51] . This same open source hardware design approach [52] can be applied to medical equipment [53] , [54] , [55] , [56] to overcome supply shortages [57] , [58] , [59] , [60] , [61] .…”

Standardisation of Practices in Open Source Hardware

“…The definitions and initiatives listed above cover some but not all dimensions that are frequently cited in the OSH community as key to open hardware success (Murillo et al 2019;Murillo, Molloy, and Dosemagen 2017;Bij et al 2013;Heikkinen et al 2020), as we will further discuss in this article. These dimensions include modularity (to enable modification and reuse), interoperability (ability to combine different OSH parts), licencing, and openness through the entire product lifecycle (Oberloier and Pearce 2018;Booeshaghi et al 2019;Gavras 2018).…”