Defining FAIR for hardware

Dear GOSH community,

I am writing on the behalf of the open-make team.
Our project aims at fostering and facilitating open and FAIR hardware in academia
(production, use and recognition), with a particular focus on the German landscape.

The use of the FAIR terminology (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable)
was a huge success for data, and helped develop awareness for the importance
of data documentation and computer readability of this documentation.
Accordingly, FAIR principles are being adapted to research software
(see FAIR4RS RDA group and output).

We think a definition of FAIR principles for hardware could also achieve
a large impact and we are building a team to start this process.
We plan to follow the strategy used by the FAIR4RS team
and open RDA/FORCE11 groups
once we have an initial plan and core team,
in order to maximize our reach inside and outside the hardware makers communities.

Are you interested to join the team ?

Please send us your contact information via this google form,
we will organise a video conference call in the coming weeks
to present and discuss this initiative:

Expected Impact (adapted from FAIR4RS impact terms):

Adoption and implementation of the FAIR for research hardware principles will create significant benefits for many stakeholders, including increased research reproducibility for research organisations, better practices and more hardware usage for its developers, clarity for funders around their own policies and requirements for hardware investments, and guidelines for publishers on sharing requirements.

This work will be of value to hardware project owners, researchers, users of research data, software and hardware, the scientific community, research hardware engineers, hardware developers who publish their hardware, hardware catalogue maintainers, repository managers, hardware preservation and archival experts, policymakers who are responsible for defining digital policies, organizations that create, modify, manage, share, protect, and preserve research hardware, funders of research, and others with an interest in the FAIR principles for research hardware.

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Thank you for this initiative!
I shared recently a link to the conference https://pssoh.etf.bg.ac.rs/ where we plan to present a paper “Towards FAIR Principles for Open Hardware” that might be of interest to your initiative too. We (authors of the paper) met at the CURE-FAIR RDA WG which is also an interesting resource. Hopefully, we will also join monthly community call for GOSH soon…

–Nadica Miljković

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Awesome, another instance of “if this is a good idea, you are probably not the first one to have it” :wink:

Looking forward to meet you soon.

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Great!

Thanks for sharing here, I’m interested in knowing more about the initiative.

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Thanks Julien, Robert and Moritz for putting together the coming “FAIR” for hardware, working group. I have just added my details in the form and really looking forward to joining you and creating win-win situations.

Regards
Miguel

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Here is the results of our first meeting, updates will also be make public there: defining FAIR for research software

Dear all,

Please join the conversation about applying the FAIR principles for (open) hardware in a research data alliance (RDA) group: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/fair-principles-research-hardware.

Our main objective is to create a document that redefine the FAIR principles for (open) hardware. Everybody is welcome.

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I have singed up on for an account on RDA, awaiting approval.

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As promised, here’s the link to video recording of the presentation for paper “Towards FAIR Principles for Open Hardware”, https://youtu.be/MW5FLy1l9LI from the PSSOH conference, and also a recording from the GOSH Community call on the same topic presented by Ana Trisovic - https://youtu.be/HgLd0AzUo4c.

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