The Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH), a global and diverse community whose goal is to make open hardware ubiquitous in science by 2025, invites TIP participants to a collaborative exercise around its policy strategy, including a series of policy briefs aimed at different institutional stakeholders. Open Hardware, or the practice of openly sharing designs, instructions, and manufacturing files for objects and devices, is gaining momentum worldwide. In contrast to centralised and proprietary knowledge production models, open hardware collaborative practices and greater accessibility to knowledge facilitate coordination and innovation efforts between multiple and diverse stakeholders. In science, black boxed hardware leads to less reproducibility, increased lock-in to specific vendors and significant delays for customizing or repairing tools, while limiting access to knowledge infrastructures in resource-limited settings. As part of its activities, GOSH is currently producing a series of policy briefs targeting critical institutional stakeholders, framing open science hardware as an enabler of multiple knowledge pathways, democratizing access to the tools necessary to unlock ideas and currently non-pursued research questions. Starting from this recent work, we’d like you to take part in a collaborative exercise to help advance our policy strategy and tools: broadening and deepening our perspectives, identifying key stakeholders, envisaging novel configurations enabled by open hardware for science, and potential transformation scenarios that the GOSH recommendations could unleash.
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