Friday 8th of July 9:00 - 12:00
Flypi Workshop
TReND in Africa
Open Labware
Friday 8th of July - 16:55
Closing remarks on Open science hardware
Research tools are paramount for scientific development, they enable researchers to observe and manipulate natural phenomena, learn their principles, make predictions and develop new technologies, treatments and improve living standards. Due to their costs and the geographical distribution of manufacturing companies access to them is not widely available, hindering the pace of research, the ability of many communities to contribute to science and education and reap its benefits.
One possible solution for this issue is to create research tools under the open source ethos, where all documentation about them (including their designs, building and operating instructions) are made freely available. Dubbed Open Science Hardware (OSH), this production method follows the established and successful principles of open source software and brings many advantages over traditional creation methods such as: economic savings (see Pearce 2020 for potential economic savings in developing open source research tools), distributed manufacturing, repairability, and higher customizability. This development method has been greatly facilitated by recent technological developments in fast prototyping tools, Internet infrastructure, documentation platforms and lower costs of electronic off-the-shelf components.
Taken together these benefits have the potential to make research more inclusive, equitable, distributed and most importantly, more reliable and reproducible, as - 1) researchers can know their tools inner workings in minute detail - 2) they can calibrate their tools before every experiment and having them running in optimal condition everytime - 3) given their lower price point, a)students can be trained/taught with hands on classes, b) several copies of the same instrument can be built leading to a parallelization of data collection and the creation of more robust datasets. - 4) Labs across the world can share the exact same type of instruments and create collaborative projects with standardized data collection and sharing.
Find out more about Andre’s research
I’m passionate about open science and open source hardware, and how those two can be used to increase research and education reach around the world. I have a background in Neurosciences and have been developing affordable open science hardware and teaching others to do so via workshops, talks and outreach events. I started Open Neuroscience, and volunteer at Trend in Africa as an open source adviser and by organizing and running Open Labware workshops. Currently I work at the Department of Neurosciences in the University of Sussex, where I develop equipment to support research labs. For more details on those projects check the Open Sussex Neuroscience page On my spare time I offer consultancy services around open science hardware through Prometheus Science. If you need to replicate a methods paper, or if you’d like something custom built for your lab, get in touch! If you would like to get in touch, drop me a line using the contact form at the end of this page!
