Workshop: Open Labware - Building Open Science Equipment

14:40 - 16:00 BST |  Monday 12th April 2021

Faculty

Andre Maia Chagas, University of Sussex - Open Neuroscience: Challenging academic barriers with Open Source hardware
Barbora Marsikova, Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology - UC2: Modular bridge between methods and applications
Matthieu Louis, University of California, Santa Barbara - PiVR: a versatile closed-loop tracker to create virtual sensory realities on a budget
Victor Kumbol, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin - DIY Labware: Leveraging open hardware to promote science in Africa

Background and aims

From Skinner boxes to bioamplifiers, custom tools have enabled researchers to look at nature in unprecedented ways. To make science truly open, people need to get access to scientific instruments, as without them we are unable to collect data and observe the natural world around us.

Luckily, technological development, coupled with internet infrastructure, has lowered the access barrier to the knowledge necessary to build tools as well as the cost of the components used in them, which means that different groups around the world have been making their own tools and publishing detailed descriptions in peer-reviewed journals. These tools normally cost a fraction of what is sold by equipment companies and - because they are better documented - researchers using them have a much better understanding of their capabilities and limitations, making interpretation of data collected easier (find more details on the ethos of open science hardware here and here here).

With the number of publications describing new and more complex tools in neurosciences increasing over time, we believe that basic knowledge on how to build things is essential for members of the community; neuroscientists will be better equipped to evaluate the benefits and shortcomings of available tools and therefore be more capacitated to design experiments with them as well as interpret resultant data.

In this workshop participants will discover how easy it is to start building your own tools using off-the-shelf electronic components, open-source technologies and freely available knowledge from the maker movement. Participants will build a simple reaction time task and understand how it contains the bare minimum for most tool-building projects in neurosciences!

In the final part of the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to research a piece of equipment they would like to use in their labs, find out if there is a freely available model online and see how they could build/customize it themselves.

We hope that after the workshop, participants will feel comfortable enough to take on more complicated projects and have a better idea of the online communities that are developing open-source tools for science.

About the organizers

This workshop will be given by two well-known advocates of the open science hardware movement: Prof. Thomas Baden who recently won the Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact https://go.nature.com/3acKeKC and Andre Maia Chagas a Mozilla Fellow https://mzl.la/2TdO5Sf. Both are editors open-PLOS and open-source tool kit and active members of TReND in Africa. As collaborators of the NGO Trend in Africa Tom and Andre taught more than 100 African students and researchers how to leverage open source tools for science in different workshops across the continent. They’ve also published a number of papers describing different Open tools for Neurosciences: http://bit.ly/38dIJu8, http://bit.ly/39dQ0eN, https://go.nature.com/2Tc4tlU, http://bit.ly/2TdUUmL, https://go.nature.com/2wTzfay.