Jenny Molloy is a Shuttleworth Fellow at the University of Cambridge, studying the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. In particular she researches the potential for local, distributed manufacturing of enzymes to improve access and build capacity for biological research. This work combines technical development using synthetic biology-based platform technologies and open science hardware with qualitative research on challenges faced by molecular biologists globally.
Shannon Dosemagen has spent her career working with environment and public health groups to address declining freshwater resources, coastal land loss and building monitoring programs with communities living adjacent to industrial facilities. She is an environmental health advocate, community science champion, and enthusiastic about the potential for open systems and technology to support the creation of a more just and equitable future. She is a Shuttleworth Fellow working on the Open Environmental Data Project, and previously co-founded Public Lab, acting as executive director from 2010-2020.
Both Shannon and Jenny are active members of the open science hardware and broader open hardware communities and look forward to stewarding the journal’s development at this exciting time for open hardware, as per their statement below.
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We’re delighted to be taking on this new challenge, following the excellent work of founding Editors-in-Chief Tobias Wenzel and Luis Felipe R. Murillo. We applaud them for their commitment in successfully initiating the first community-owned journal for open hardware and gathering together such an esteemed Editorial Board. We’re also thankful that they will continue as Section Editors at JOH.
Our initial goal as Editors in Chief is shaped by the time we live in. COVID-19 has led to the largest mobilization of distributed, rapid manufacturing of open hardware ever seen and we believe that the Journal will play a vital role in bringing together scholarship that helps us make sense of this, learn from it and apply that learning to future crises. We are therefore looking forward to coordinating the newly announced JOH Special Collection on COVID-19 and open hardware.
Beyond the pandemic, we are taking up this position at an exciting time for open hardware. For example, there have been recent legal advances with the publication of CERN OHL v2 and new standards being established such as DINSPEC 3015-2 and the Open Know-How Manifest. We see growing interest in the application of open sensor technologies, increased consideration being given to open hardware interoperability, and experimentation with new community structures and business models, to name just a few topics that dominate our own conversations at the moment. JOH offers a unique platform for scholarship covering the whole ecosystem of open hardware, with community-based peer review and a commitment to open access at a fair publishing fee. We aim to keep those strong foundations in place and build on them by increasing submissions of three article types in the first instance: Issues in Open Hardware research papers covering topics such as those described above, plus Hardware Metapapers and Reviews.
We plan to encourage more hardware developers to share their designs in a revitalized metapaper article format that is already being developed by our Editors. This will capture the hardware-focused information often omitted from narrative and data-focused research papers in a concise way, wrapped around high quality documentation of designs.
Our plans are driven by our joint interest in ensuring technical developments in open hardware are not isolated from their social context. With this in mind, we also plan to ensure that our community represents open hardware scholars and practitioners from across the globe so we will be reaching out to strengthen the regional diversity of the Editorial Board and of our authors in the coming months.
We warmly welcome suggestions from those in the open hardware community for additional steps we can take and we look forward to ensuring the Journal of Open Hardware offers a useful and impactful venue for global open hardware scholarship.
Posted on 01 Jun 2020
Edited by Shannon Dosemagen, Jenny Molloy, Nadya Peek, Tobias Wenzel and Luis Felipe R. Murillo
COVID-19 has led to the largest mobilization of distributed, rapid manufacturing of open hardware ever seen. The Journal of Open Hardware is launching a Special Collection on the open-source response to the pandemic.
Open technologies have become an important part of relief efforts during major crises in recent history. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing another peak in activities around open technologies at an unprecedented scale. The pandemic has led to the largest mobilization of distributed, rapid manufacturing and open hardware ever seen. This has resulted in hundreds of designs for personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and more by groups around the world, being manufactured by thousands of individuals, community centers, and small and large corporations.
Open hardware designs are being published both formally and informally and designs are being manufactured in new spaces including homes, schools, community labs, and reconfigured factories. However, there is also a need for improving documentation standards; as well as to advance the analysis, reflection, and critique around the role of open hardware verification and testing in the COVID-19 response. Previously, free and open source technologies for collaborative mapping have been used to support affected communities in the aftermath of the 2010 BP oil spill, and in the Haitian, Chilean, and Nepali earthquakes to collect and distribute disaster relief information. Community-driven rapid prototyping of radiation monitoring devices took place within a week of the outbreak of the triple disaster of Fukushima, Japan in 2011. Examples such as these and the rapid mobilization around COVID-19 demonstrate the importance of learning how free and open source development can be mobilized to address different crises.
What can we learn from previous projects to help mitigate disease outbreaks? How do COVID-19 projects help us better understand and support OH development and community dynamics in the context of a critical event? In this Special Collection we are interested in responding to these questions by drawing together articles from researchers and practitioners on topics including (but not limited to):
Articles will be reviewed, processed and (if appropriate) published online as soon as possible, without delay as in traditional special issues.
For a PDF version of the call, click here.
Posted on 22 May 2020
The Journal of Open Hardware (JOH) is accepting submissions for 2020.
JOH was launched in March 2017 as the first international open access peer reviewed academic forum for an interdisciplinary discussion of open hardware research. The journal accepts submissions which cover technical, legal, scientific, economic, educational and sociocultural aspects of hardware design, fabrication, and distribution. We invite submissions from various fields, such as (but not limited to) human-machine interaction, biotechnology, engineering, physics, computer science, humanities and social sciences, among others.
We are the only journal to review hardware documentation alongside manuscripts and to ensure that projects are not only replicable, but also modifiable, which is at the heart of the open source principle and its potential to drive innovation.
The Journal of Open Hardware publishes as soon as articles are ready. There is no delay in research being released compared to traditional “issues”. Submissions can be sent throughout the year. The journal’s average submission to acceptance time in 2018 was 88 days.
We accept online submissions via our journal website. See our Author Guidelines for further information. Alternatively, please contact the editor for more information.
Here are the two most popular papers we have published so far:
Jonveaux, L., 2017. Arduino-like development kit for single-element ultrasound imaging. Journal of Open Hardware, 1(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/joh.2
Pearce, J.M., 2017. Emerging Business Models for Open Source Hardware. Journal of Open Hardware, 1(1), p.2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/joh.4
Thank you to reviewers
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the peer reviewers who gave their time and expertise during 2019 to help ensure that the Journal of Open Hardware continues to publish rigorously tested research. As always, we are extremely appreciative of the efforts put in to ensure that high academic quality is maintained.
Posted on 22 Jan 2020