A focus on Open Science Hardware Metaresearch

The Open Science Hardware Foundation (OSHF, an entity created by the Gathering for Open Science Hardware -GOSH - community) had organised a workshop in Geneva with the goal to discuss and update the GOSH roadmap. The workshop took place from the 21 to the 23d of January 2026. It was called HEROES for “Hardware Ecosystem Requirements for Open and Emerging Science”. A first roadmap was created 10 years ago at the first GOSH meeting, which was also organised in Geneva. This year’s meeting had been very intense and it confirmed that our local vision at Open.Make fits with the global vision of the community. In particular, the importance of involving knowledge transfer offices (also called technology transfer offices) in the development of open science hardware was emphasised. In order to enable OSH prototypes to evolve into sustainable products, the manufacturing of the product should be included in early design. TTOs can play a major advisory role for identifying sustainable models and external links for the production of OSH. In addition, our first vision of a Centre of Competence complements well the concept of OSPOs (open source program offices) which was extensively presented in Geneva.

Notes using Etherpad were taken along the whole event, which took place in three locations: the CERN, SDG of the university of Geneva, and the ITU of the UN. Four main topics were investigated: Standards, ecosystems, institutions and economics. This post presents my main take home messages.

Creating support structures

Open source program offices (OSPOs is a concept of support to create and implement open source solutions, either in academia or in governmental agencies. Their mission is to bring best practices to researchers (or governmental agencies) in using and building open source programs. It is mainly aimed at software (including Gen-AI solutions) and to the topic of sovereignty (independence and control towards technologies). CERN’s OSPO is organised by securing 10% of the time of board members for activities linked to the OSPO. In the CERN, Javier Serrano is responsible for the open source hardware part of the project.

Manufacturing: the elephant in the room

During the workshop, the topic of manufacturing was a recurring one. We questioned who is building hardware and how researchers may find manufacturers and design for a larger user base (“building tools instead of toys”). The question of bringing OSH solutions to the market was also brought on the table several times. We questioned both the idea that the price of OSH was an important factor and the idea that OSH should be marketed using growth-based business models. The background idea is that the values of open source hardware are incompatible with common marketing strategies. Should we look for or develop business models which would benefit from open source strategies (in for instance in terms of sufficiency, community governance, and sovereignty), instead of trying to adapt existing business models for exploiting OSH projects?

OSH as a risk mitigation

From discussion on standards and transfer, we often spoke about risks related to different activities. We also highlighted some risks linked to working with proprietary (closed source) products. For instance, what would happen if Raspberry Pi would stop its production of cheap boards, or make it much more expensive: the design is not open source and lots of projects would die? This vendor lock-in issue is well known in the software industry: becoming dependent on one specific provider, you become unable to apply market rules and this can create monopolies. Open Source (both software and hardware) is a way to break these bubbles, as different manufacturers can provide you with the same product.

Standards as communication tools

Inside the standardisation-linked panels, we discussed a lot whether it was a good time to create new standards for OSH. The goal is to communicate with institutions like procurement offices and funding agencies, which could use the standards in their current workflows. This could indeed create new communities around the standards. If one wants to go on the standardisation path, we should make sure a large and diverse community is involved. This would limit the risks linked to create a standard too soon.

We wondered where other tools like “explainer documents” could do a better job. These documents should be concise, consistent and directed toward a specific target group. We discussed about using this strategy with knowledge transfer offices. Especially, in relation with new patenting directives in the USA forcing universities to transfer intellectual property right to federal instances.

The community

Of course the most interesting part of the workshop was to meet people. For instance, I met Kaitlin Thaney from the invest in open infrastructure project, and realised we had met in Berlin in 2017, as Mozilla did its open leadership program. I met Javier Serrano and Amanda Diez Fernandez who Robert interviewed (see the white rabbit post) at the start of the Open.Make project. I also met Pen-Yuan Hsing in real life. Learning that his contract was ending, we rushed into writing an incoming fellowship at the Objective 3 of the Berlin University Alliance for Advancing Research Quality and Value, so Pen can join us in Mai/June and help us bring new test cases to the project (stay tuned for more information).

Conclusions

The workshop main take home message is the need of better support structure for the development of OSH in science and academia. Entities like OSPOs should be developed further. They should help the community to link with existing institutional structures like transfer offices and libraries, have a clear communication strategy with good arguments targeted to specific actors, develop sustainability plans including the identification of new business opportunities at early development stages, and monitor the impact of this work. I met community members who can help us building a network of such support structure, which will eventually make OSH ubiquitous in academia.

I might have been biased, but these conclusions resonated with our vision at Open.Make. They consolidated our concept of a Centre of Competences for OSH in Berlin. Stay tuned for a presentation of this concept as a blog post here, and live at the OHS2026.