WebsEdge/Education

Open science is quickly becoming the norm in many research fields, with several funding agencies starting to mandate publishing in open access journals, and the sharing of data in open data repositories. This approach works well for research areas where the result is a scientific finding, code or data. If the result of the scientific work is a new tool or instrument, sharing the results in an open science fashion is much more difficult. Advancements in measurement technology have been at the centre of many scientific breakthroughs in the biophysics and life sciences. Many of these technologies were developed in academic research labs. Yet for them to reach the broader scientific community often takes many years and the typical route is commercialization. While for some technologies the commercialization is the most effective route, many great technological advances from laboratories are not well suited for commercialization, and hence this technology never reaches the wider scientific community. In our lab at the interfaculty institute for bioengineering, we are developing an alternative route for disseminating the outcome of instrumentation research in an open science fashion. We have developed the concept of open hardware workshops where participants come to EPFL for workshops where we teach them to make copies of our instruments. They then take these instruments back home to their own labs to use in their research. The goal is to develop best practice standards for sharing high-end scientific instrumentation developments in the spirit of open science.