open designs

See the following -

Gathering for Open Science Hardware 2017: Building a Movement

Without hardware, there is no science. Instruments, reagents, computers, and lab equipment are the platforms for producing systematic knowledge. Innovations from lenses to atomic force microscopes to DNA sequencers to particle accelerators have opened up new fields of knowledge with huge potential impacts for science and society. However, participants in the Gathering for Open Science Hardware, currently taking place at the Innovation Centre, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, argue that limited access to scientific tools impedes the progress and reach of science. Black-box scientific tools block creativity and customization through high mark-ups and proprietary designs, compounded by intellectual property restrictions...

 

Why Now Is A Great Time To Consider A Career In Open Source Hardware

Twenty years or so ago, almost no one even knew what open source hardware was, let alone planned a career around it. In 2000, for example, out of the more than 2 million academic papers published that year in the entire world, only seven articles even mentioned "open source hardware" at all. When I first wrote Open-Source Lab, I'd collected every example (only a few dozen) and could easily keep up and read every open hardware article that got published to post them on a wiki. I am happy to report that is no longer physically possible. There have already been over 1,500 articles that discuss "open source hardware" this year, and I am sure many more will be out by year's end. Open source hardware is now a field of its own, with a few journals dedicated to it specifically (for example, HardwareX and the Journal of Open Hardware). In a wide range of fields, dozens of traditional journals now routinely cover the latest open hardware developments.