CERN played a pioneering role in the early 2010s in introducing Open Source Hardware (OSHW) to physics and beyond. Our activities go beyond the sharing of hardware designs and include licence drafting and stewardship, hosting and curating designs from all over the world and contributing to the development of software tools to simulate and design hardware. Identifying opportunities to collaborate with industry for the development and commercialisation of OSHW is another key part of our process to maximise impact on society.

Open Hardware Statement in the CERN Open Science Policy

CERN makes its technologies broadly available to society and introduced open hardware licensing as a key mechanism to achieve this goal. Open hardware designs are made available through the Open Hardware Repository. The legal basis for sharing of open hardware is enabled through variants of the CERN Open Hardware Licence. Hardware design releases will consider opportunities for collaboration with other research communities and industry. In cases where extensive documentation and ancillary components like software for interfacing and testing are required for projects, these should be licensed under appropriate open source documentation and software licences respectively.

Key contacts at CERN

• Javier Serrano (Open Hardware expert in CERN's Beams department)
• Myriam Ayass (Licensing expert, CERN Knowledge Transfer group)