Open Hardware is a way of developing and distributing physical tools and equipment, where developers make designs and build instructions freely available online, under specific licenses that determine how the shared documentation can be used. Very similar to Open Source Software, this way of distributing know-how enables everyone to locally replicated, learn, modify and improve on existing designs. Open Hardware designs are present in many different fields from health care to computing technologies, and examples include equipment for automated COVID testing, smartwatches, farming robots, MRI machines, Geiger counters, and educational tools. 

In academia, open hardware is becoming pervasive and has several positive outcomes for science and education, as researchers now have an ever growing library of designs for tools and educational resources in the form of peer-reviewed articles and other online repositories. This resource can be used to create innovative experiments, as researchers can think about what kind of research questions they would like to pursue, which kind of experiments would be needed to address those, and finally build specific tools to perform said experiments (instead of the traditional way of adapting experiments based on available equipment at a lab/institute). Moreover, leveraging open hardware we can change the way we train and educate researchers in training, as we can add practical and hands on experiments to complement and/or substitute “passive lectures” based solely on theoretical explanations. On this talk we will see the details on how this is happening, what implications it could have for research going forward and how it is being applied by different groups in different fields across the globe.