Hardware Reference
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FIGURE 2.2 Part of the solar photovoltaic arrays that make up the open solar outdoors test
field taken from a live open-access video feed on January 9, 2013.
Thus, the advantages to providing some open access to work underway for any researcher
wanting to disseminate their research is clear. There are also advantages of using an open-re-
search approach within a research group. First, the open literature reviews are extremely ef-
fective for passing on knowledge to the next generation of students, finding references when
writing a paper, and keeping track of background research. These are useful to group alumni
who often continue to use the wiki and contribute to the efforts of the group when they stay
in the field(s). Open protocols are important for maintaining standards within the group re-
search, but also building more easily on the work of others. In some disciplines, the sharing
of free- and open-source protocols is very advanced (e.g. OpenWetWare.org , which is an ef-
fort to promote the sharing of information in biology and biological engineering), while other
disciplines (e.g. mechanical engineering relying on proprietary ASME standards or electrical
engineers relying on IEEE) are not. There are several generic open-source research web sites
now that can provide the needs for nearly any discipline such as openresearch.org (a semantic
wiki for the sciences) or myexperiment.org (which publishes scientific worklows).
There are thus advantages of greater adoption of open-access and open-source research for
students. Free (zero cost) access to the latest literature is an intuitively obvious advantage,
which should result in beter-quality lab reports, term papers, and student writing. However,
students also benefit from faster learning and higher quality information from the aggressive
 
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