The OSHWA Certification database is one of our longest running programs, developed with extensive consultation with community members with the goal of creating a united space where fully open source hardware projects can exist. We have seen it grow over the years to a point where it is now boasting over 3,300 different listings, with projects from nearly every continent (we’re still working for the Antarctic but any day now!), and we are working hard to hit every country.
While some understand the importance of certification immediately, at times it can still be a little bit confusing. Why would you need a spot to contain all open hardware projects? Isn’t it easy to just declare something open source and let it live out in the world?
In many ways, this is something anyone can do. There’s no requirement to certify a project for it to be open source hardware! However, the benefits of certification are quite a big deal the more you look at it. Beyond the obvious, it's nice to have an easy spot to look for projects to build or a place to start when exploring a new idea; certification provides a certain amount of prior art security.
Vadim Shlyonskiy works at the University of Brussels as a professor teaching physics and physics to medical students while pursuing his research in a teaching lab focused on neuromorphic electronics and its nonlinear dynamics, data acquisition, artificial biomembranes, ion channels and more.
During this time Shlyonskiy and his colleague, David Gall, created multiple versions of an open-source lipid bilayer amplifier.
“We thought it would be a good idea to keep it open for everybody because what we do with medical students is useful,” Shlyonaski said.
This led to a paper on the design being published in 2019 with a CC-SA license, so copies should share alike, as well as a certification BE0000002 in the OSHWA database in 2020. They continued developing their work, occasionally having people reaching out on the project.
“People were interested, they wanted to get hands on the design and make it themselves. We were contacted [by groups] from Taiwan and from Germany. People have built it in China so the people are already using our design for teaching.”
Shylonskiy keeps up to date on the area and is constantly reading scientific research journals, and then in 2023 he came across a familiar article in a closed journal initially he was excited to see someone else working on something similar.
“The topic was exactly what we are doing,” Shylonskiy said. “I was reading the paper and I was surprised to see my design, literally. The schematics were drawn differently but it was exactly our design with our values of electronic components.”
There was no citation for their work in the paper. Attribution is inherent in most open licenses.
While the paper itself had its own content, the hardware design was identical to his. It was also locked behind having institutional access or paying for the article, contrary to the open source aspect of the design. Shylonskiy contacted the journal to begin the work of correcting the lack of citation and making the open source hardware design inaccessible.
The editors didn’t quite understand what the problem was. Shylonskiy provided his papers and they reviewed texts and figures between the two and initially didn’t see what the issue was.
“There were several rounds of email exchanges to explain everything in every detail,” Shylonskiy noted. If you’ve been working in open source hardware, It’s not uncommon to have these conversations. We are seeing more people make openly but a lot of the time it starts with a conversation about what that can really look like in practice in different spaces, like journals.
“After explanations the editors agreed. They properly cited our paper and openly provided the full bill of materials and the design,” Shylonskiy said. “You could not build their amplifier because there are no electrical components cited, the schematics were exactly like ours but you couldn’t build it.”
The editors agreed to disclose all the components and published an erratum with a full citation with the bill of materials and schematics with a reference to their OSHWA certification. The OSHWA certification helped give the clout he needed to force the "copy cat" to also open source their design (share-alike) and give attribution required by the license. In addition it gave a third party date stamp for the Journal to confirm.
Shylonskiy is proud to already be preparing for his next round of certifications, this experience helped reinforce his passion for open source.
“There’s a whole bunch of sites, articles where people share but they’re not aware that they could certify and get a place where it could be easily accessible,” He said, mentioning how tedious it can be to dig through for the information.
“Your search can yield some results on which you can base a build for something useful for your teaching but it's a lot of effort. The certification gives direct access. You can search your database. There's already plenty of stuff for neuroscience on the OSHWA certification list!"
