Development and Sharing of Open Science Hardware: Lessons Learned from Wikimedia Fellowships

Abstract

The promise of open hardware as a branch of open science is a sustainable change of research instrumentation towards more openly documented and licensed designs. Methods, code, and data are already valued by journal editors and peer-reviews to judge if a study's result can be replicated with the information provided in a manuscript. The open hardware movement seeks to include laboratory tools and research instrumentation into the same category. Availability of and access to open hardware equipment are set to democratize professional lab work and field studies as well as enhance the transferability of methods to civic science settings. Here, we report four case studies from the first five years of the Wikimedia Program "Free Knowledge", an open science fellowship funded by Wikimedia Germany and partners. The project developers discuss and evaluate the impact related to key aspects typically attributed with open hardware: costs, availability, adaptability, community and educational value. The open hardware projects covered in this review span from natural sciences to life sciences to education.