The Journal of Open Hardware is pleased to welcome six new members to the Editorial Board. As the field of open hardware grows, the Journal is committed to maintaining a diversity of perspectives and expertise to ensure we remain a place for scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines and communities to advance open hardware research through novel development, analysis, reflection and learning. We asked each of our new editors to tell us a bit about their work and why JOH and open hardware are so important at this moment:
Julieta Arancio is a Phd student in Science and Technology Studies from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She analyzes how open science hardware initiatives in Latin America and Africa are contributing to opening up science to technology in the region. She is an active member of the Global Open Science Hardware community and co-organizes its Latin American chapter, reGOSH. As part of her involvement with Mozilla Open Leaders program, she co-founded a fork of it, Open Hardware Makers, a mentorship program for young open hardware projects.
“I think open hardware can be instrumental to key changes that our manufacturing and scientific socio-technical systems urgently demand. I see it as an opportunity to transform the process of how technology is conceived by opening up the game to new ideas, perspectives and actors to question designs and propose alternatives. I consider JOH as having a fundamental role in this aspect, to ensure knowledge on open hardware is inviting new voices to speak up, to broaden the concept beyond its technical aspects and to value interdisciplinary approaches, and to push for new directions in the field that challenge the status quo.”
Babasile Daniel Oladele-Emmanuel is an avid Open Source Hardware (OSH) evangelist, with interest in boosting the awareness of OSH on the African continent. He is a manager at OpenLab Hamburg and the initiator of GreenLab Microfactory in Nigeria.
“In the past, Open Hardware was relevant to the development of the global village we presently live in, and a projection into the future foretells that it will still remain relevant. JOH will ensure the collation and dissemination of the information about Open Hardware.”
Hagit Keysar is currently a postdoc fellow of the Minerva Stiftung (2019-2021), in the Natural History Museum, Berlin. Her research is interdisciplinary and practice-based in the fields of science and technology studies, visual culture, and politics. She completed her PhD in 2016 at the Politics and Government department, Ben Gurion University, Israel; in her thesis, titled: “Prototyping the Civic View From Above: Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography in Israel-Palestine”, she critically examined the political potential of civic/community science and open-source practices in situations of civic inequalities and human rights violations. Hagit continues to explore the role played by geospatial data and technologies in shaping how people conceptualize rights and articulate politics, and recently began to develop new research interests related to the datafication of nature and natural history collections.
“As an activist and researcher in the social sciences I am interested in open hardware first and foremost as a movement of people that holds a political potential to radically transform relations of power that structure the production of knowledge and define boundaries between technology, science and politics. I think the recent emergence of open hardware brings forth exciting opportunities for developing transformative technoscientific tools and collaborative practices that extend beyond the professional fields of science, art and design to address critical issues such as race, gender, colonialism and other forms of domination that structure our world. The JOH is an important node for supporting this movement both conceptually and materially, not only for advancing cutting edge innovation but also for shaping and reshaping its critical edges and reflexive thought.”
Thomas Mboa is a researcher in Information and Communication, with interest in the Maker Movement, social Innovation, Open science, and Scholarly Communication. With a background in Biochemistry, Thomas Mboa is deeply engaged in promoting DIYbio and democratizing Biotechnology in Africa. His work with DIYBio is visible through his own biohackerspace in Cameroon: the Mboalab (www.mboalab.africa), which is part of the Open Bioeconomy Lab (https://openbioeconomy.org). Thomas also operates through the Africa Open Science & Hardware network (www.africaosh.com) which he co-leads, aiming to strengthen African stakeholders and catalyse grassroots innovation through Open Tech culture. (More here https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9678-7765).
“The amazing thing with Open Hardware is free circulation of design without any geographical barriers; this is a catalyser of redistributed and equitable manufacturing across the world and specifically in Africa. The JOH is the suitable platform to make OH information FAIR (Findable – Accessible – Interoperable – Re-Usable).“
Khadidiatou Sall’s research explores biotechnology, genomics and hardware technology and how these can be used to solve social issues related to climate change, lack of access to education, and health care in Africa. In 2016, she founded SeeSD (Science Education Exchange for Sustainable Development), an organization that provides access to STEAM learning opportunities. SeeSD who has empowered over 2000 people, is promoting STEAM education by challenging the current education system in Senegal and proposing solutions that are more hands-on, adapted to the local context and focused on providing skills from a young age. Khadidiatou Sall is also the founder of Ubbil, an innovation lab that is working on creating a human resource that is creative, innovative and capable of solving Africa social issues through education, research and development.
“In a world ridden with inequalities, it is important to fight for access to resources and equity. Open Hardware makes sure that people have access to knowledge, which can be used/adapted to create tools that help local communities become self-sufficient. An obstacle this movement should overcome is developing tools that are sharable and usable within large and diverse communities that do not necessarily share the same culture, nor languages, nor education. This will require building bridges between different communities, which we hope to do through JOH.”
Harold Tay was formally trained as a mechanical engineer and in that capacity has worked in the defense industry before moving on to software, and then to electronics. More recently he worked for 15 years as an engineer in a research lab at the National University of Singapore building equipment for use in underwater acoustics, underwater robotics, and environmental monitoring projects. At present he is working on applications of technology to issues in wildlife conservation, concentrating on acoustic methods.
“I would like to see users of science and technology become creators of the same, and from more diverse fields. Unfettered high-quality communication is a way to raise creators from users.”
Posted on 10 Jul 2020
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. If you would like to send an abstract for initial review and feedback, we welcome them but note that an abstract is not mandatory.
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