Building Open Source Hardware in Academia - Building Open Source Hardware - page 296

Open source hardware provides academics with the opportunity to share and gain five
key benefits:
Substantial pre-peer review in the development of background material and experi-
mental design, which leads to ...
Improved experimental design and laboratory hardware design (often with radic-
ally reduced economic costs) and hardware with superior performance and custom-
ization.
Increased visibility, citations and improved public relations, which lead to ...
Increased funding opportunities and enhanced student recruitment and ...
Improved student research-related training and research education.
We discuss each of these benefits in turn in the following subsections.
Pre-Peer Review in the Development of Background Material
and Experimental Design
Experiments conducted in my labs represented a first attempt to apply the lesson learned
from the natural experiment of software patents analysis conducted by Bessen and Maskin
to research. Overall, these experiments involving open source research were successful,
and there was an observable increase in the quality and quantity of both research and ap-
plications (Pearce, 2012a).
First, there were several advantages we saw as academics when we used an open wiki
(e.g., Wikipedia). A wiki is a webpage that is easily edited; such editing has a relatively
shallow learning curve. 6 Multiple members of the research teams are able to edit pages
(e.g., a methodology description) at the same time, asynchronously or from different loca-
tions. These advantages of version control and collaboration hold true for closed wikis as
well, but an open wiki enables others from outside the research group to assist your re-
search—that is, to participate in the open source way in the same way that teams of open
source software developers collaborate. For example, our group is routinely helped by ex-
ternal collaborators, which saves us time and directly improves our work. Other examples
of assistance from wiki users not affiliated directly with research groups include giving
helpful comments on the discussion tab of group pages; fixing grammar/spelling errors
and typographical errors; making improvements to algorithms and electronic tools; cor-
recting mistakes or improving our 3D printable designs; and listing our work on other
sites, placing it in categories within the wiki, and hyperlinking either to or within work
that a group has done, which adds to the value and accessibility of the work (Pearce,
2012a).