Open Hardware seminars

This seminar, hosted by the LIBRE hub project, will provide an in-depth introduction to the Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement. Since its inception, GOSH has been instrumental in advancing open-source hardware within scientific research, fostering a diverse and active community. The seminar will cover the history of GOSH, its current initiatives, and future opportunities, with a particular focus on the contributions and activities of the Latin American branch. This session aims to inform researchers, educators, and policy-makers about the significance and impact of GOSH in promoting accessibility and collaboration in science instrumentation.

Open science hardware (OSH) as a concept usually refers to artifacts, but also to a practice, a discipline and a collective of people pushing for open access to the design of science tools. Since 2016, the Global Open Science Hardware (GOSH) movement gathers actors from academia, education, the private sector and civic organisations to advocate for OSH to be ubiquitous by 2025. In Latin America, GOSH advocates have fundraised and gathered around the development of annual "residencies" for building hardware for science and education. The community is currently defining its regional strategy and identifying other regional actors working on science and technology democratization. In this presentation I will give an overview of the open hardware movement for science, with a focus on the activities and strategy of the Latin American chapter and concrete ways to engage.

The Open Science movement advocates for more transparent, equitable and reliable science. It focusses on improving existing infrastructures and spans all aspects of the scientific process, from implementing systems that reward pre-registering studies and guarantee their publication, all the way to making research data citable and freely available. In this context, open source tools (and the development ethos supporting them) are becoming more and more present in academic labs, as researchers are realizing that they can improve the quality of their work, while cutting costs. In this talk an overview of OS tools for neuroscience will be given, with a focus on software and hardware, and how their use can bring scientific independence and make research evolve faster.