This project will contribute to this mission through new methods, tools, guidance, standards and awareness building, in order to evaluate and preserve the replicability of hardware in academia. We will pool expertise in hardware evaluation at the TUB, academic hardware making at the FUB and scholarly communication and data management at the HUB. Solutions will be designed according to our analysis of community practices. They will be prototyped and verified within chosen hardware projects of the partners in the fields of automation, physical metrology and virtual reality applications. Lessons learned during the project will feed open educational resources (OER).

The importance of OH for society has been well demonstrated during the first wave of COVID- 19 when open hardware makers started to deliver 3D-printed face shields to medical professionals in a time of great need. Our cross-disciplinary and practice-oriented approach will act as a centre of competence in the Berlin University Alliance for the development of novel standards and tools for open hardware documentation, evaluation and publication. Open, FAIR hardware especially presents an opportunity for new career paths and an alternative to traditional intellectual property rights (IPR) practices, reflecting the wider role of academic research in society.