Best practise guide

The best practise guide provides a short overview over the design and documentation practises, that members of the Open Science Hardware Movement deem important. For a more detailed and general reference, see best practices for Open-Source Hardware by the Open Source Hardware Association.

Publishing in the Journal of Open Hardware

The international open access Journal of Open Hardware (JOH) is currently the only journal that allows the inclusion of extensive stand-alone documentations, such as those based on DocuBricks, and makes them part of the academic peer-review process. Dedicated documentations are key to ensure the replicability of hardware, which is why we support this community-run initiative. The JOH board aims to offset all future publishing service cost entirely through sponsoring. Currently the papers cost 200 GBP, used to finance the services provided by our publishing partner Ubiquity Press. Alternative hardware publication venues, that do not support seperate documentations, are the Review of Scientific Instruments (2200 USD open access fee), PLOS (ca. 1000 GBP open access fee), and HardwareX (currently 550 USD. Warning: the publisher Elsevier is known for unethical behaviour towards publicaly funded academia and open science).

Impact tools for Open Science Hardware

The Impact Tools for Open Science Hardware is a collection of resources that might be of interest for projects that want to increase their visibility and monitor their impact beyond the alt-metrics and social media functions of this repository. This document was created during GOSH 2016.

Other repositories

If your project is one 3-d print or a few-component-home-project, you should consider other repositories such as for example thingiverse or instructables. If you are a scientist and the data you would like to cite is not a construction documentation or design explanation, have a look at figshare or alternatives. Perhaps you would also like to leave your project on your personal webspace or GitHub, and reference it in one of the collections below.

Have a look at our collections on thingiverse: