Journal:Haves and have nots must find a better way: The case for open scientific hardware
| Full article title | Haves and have nots must find a better way: The case for open scientific hardware |
|---|---|
| Journal | PLoS Biology |
| Author(s) | Chagas, André Maia |
| Author affiliation(s) | University of Tübingen, TReND in Africa, University of Sussex |
| Primary contact | Email: a dor maia dash chagas at sussex dot ac dot uk |
| Year published | 2018 |
| Volume and issue | 16(9) |
| Page(s) | e3000014 |
| DOI | 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000014 |
| ISSN | 1545-7885 |
| Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000014 |
| Download | https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000014&type=printable (PDF) |
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This article should be considered a work in progress and incomplete. Consider this article incomplete until this notice is removed. |
Abstract
Many efforts are making science more open and accessible; they are mostly concentrated on issues that appear before and after experiments are performed: open access journals, open databases, and many other tools to increase reproducibility of science and access to information. However, these initiatives do not promote access to scientific equipment necessary for experiments. Mostly due to monetary constraints, equipment availability has always been uneven around the globe, affecting predominantly low-income countries and institutions. Here, a case is made for the use of free open-source hardware in research and education, including countries and institutions where funds were never the biggest problem.
Perspective
In 2013, eLife senior editor Eve Marder[1] expressed concerns about the increasing costs of equipment necessary to do state-of-the-art research in the field of biology and the decreasing amount of funding available to be shared between an ever-growing number of labs and researchers. Even though the funding situation in the United States has improved since 2013, a closer look shows that the investments accumulated an inflation of 9% in the period between 2012 and 2017[2] and a budget increase of 4.5% and 6% for the National Institutes of Heath and National Science Foundation, respectively[3][4], while the Environmental Protection Agency has had a cut of 4.5% in the same period.[5] The concerns raised by this situation have been expressed for quite some time in many places of the world, where lower investment (as a proportion of gross domestic product [GDP]) in science and education makes research conditions suboptimal and access to bleeding edge technology and tools difficult. Now, in times of shrinking funding, however, this difficulty is being felt by researchers in places earlier considered safe havens of science. One of the fears Professor Marder expressed is that we might return to the “old days,” when only a privileged few men were able to do research.
A major reason for high prices in scientific equipment is related to the way innovation, technological development, and new knowledge generated inside universities and research institutes are introduced to the world: to make them commercially interesting and to allow their development outside academia, they are protected using legal mechanisms such as patents and/or copyrights, which are then licensed/sold to companies. Although this system enables universities and companies to work in collaboration and leverage each others’ strengths, it ends up locking away research results funded with public money. Not only is this morally debatable, but it also does the following:
- increases costs in product development, as each patent normally requires the involvement of specialized lawyers and has several fees that can easily sum up to considerable amounts (between U.S. $10,000 and $30,000 in 2018[6]);
- slows down innovation cycles, as sometimes companies owning patents do not invest in further developing them into commercial applications, delaying derivative innovations that would rise from its implementation.[7] Kodak for example patented[8] the idea for a charge-coupled device (CCD) digital camera (the same as today’s digital cameras) in 1978, but the first commercial versions were only released by Fuji in 1989[9];
- creates instruments/technologies that are “black boxes” since consumers are not allowed to open them up (for repair, maintenance, or simple curiosity), which, in the case of scientific equipment, can lead to an incomplete understanding of how complex instruments work as well as their capabilities and limitations; and
- results in equipment being used in suboptimal conditions or thrown away instead of being repaired, especially in countries where manufacturing companies do not offer appropriate customer support.<ref name="PerryEffect11">{{cite journal |title=Effectiveness of medical equipment donations to improve health systems: how much medical equipment is broken in the developing world? |journal=Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing |author=Perry, L.; Malkin, R. |volume=49 |issue=7 |pages=719–22 |year=2011 |doi=10.1007/s11517-011-0786-3
Abbreviations
AfricaOSH: African Open Source Hardware Summit
CCD: charge-coupled device
CERN: European Organization for Nuclear Research
CPU: central processing unit
DIY: do-it-yourself
FOSH: free open-source hardware
GDP: gross domestic product
Acknowledgements
Funding
AMC was supported by the Levelhulme Trust (Sir Philipp Leverhulme Prize 2017 for biological sciences awarded to Tom Baden). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests
I have read the journal’s policy and the author of this manuscript has the following competing interests: Editor of the Open Source Toolkit Channel for PLOS.
References
- ↑ Marder, E. (2013). "The haves and the have nots". eLife 2: e01515. doi:10.7554/eLife.01515. PMC PMC3832882. PMID 24252880. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832882.
- ↑ "CPI Inflation Calculator". Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. Retrieved 07 September 2018.
- ↑ "Budget". About NIMH. National Institutes of Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/budget/index.shtml. Retrieved 07 September 2018.
- ↑ "Budget and Performance". About NSF. National Science Foundation. https://www.nsf.gov/about/performance/. Retrieved 07 September 2018.
- ↑ "EPA's Budget and Spending". Planning Budget Results. Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget. Retrieved 07 September 2018.
- ↑ "USPTO Fee Schedule". Learning and Resources. United States Patent and Trademark Office. https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule. Retrieved 22 August 2018.
- ↑ Baker, D.; Jayadev, A.; Stiglitz, J. (July 2017). "Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Development: A Better Set of Approaches for the 21st Century". Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://cepr.net/publications/reports/innovation-intellectual-property-and-development-a-better-set-of-approaches-for-the-21st-century. Retrieved 17 August 2018.
- ↑ Lloyd, G.A.; Sasson, S.J. (26 December 1978). "United States Patent: 4131919—Electronic still camera". Patent Full Text Databases. United States Patent and Trademark Office. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/4131919.
- ↑ "Innovation History". FUJIFILM Corporation. https://www.fujifilm.eu/uk/about-us/history/innovation-history. Retrieved 22 August 2018.
Notes
This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added.
