Richard Bowman of the OpenFlexure Microscope project is looking at starting to make a gallery of modifications/improvements and is interested in potentially basing the work on the OKH specification. He is interested in having a chat about what might be possible; please reply to this thread if you are interested in connecting! I’ll be setting up a call with him in the coming weeks.
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@schutton
Dear Sarah,
I am definitely interested in the OpenFlexure Microscope. I have several students building a hybrid of a nanoparticle tracking analyzer, a zeta potential analyzer, a nanopositioner, and a confocal laser scanning microscope. The goal is to be able to watch cells morph into tissues in the presence of electric and magnetic fields, as well as growth and differentiation fractors. It was nice meeting you today (3/14/23). People to invite to these meetings are En-Te (Edwin) Hwu and Urs Gaudenz. Both are GOSH members.
Best regards,
Jim Brenner
jbrenner@fit.edu
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Hi Jim!
Great meeting with you yesterday as well. I want to get you connected with @julianstirling - we were chatting a bit about an OER opportunity RE: OpenFlexure while in Hamburg for Fab.City last week, and, given your background in educational content, we could get a group together to make something happen!
@julianstirling what do you think?
Hi @jbrennerFIT nice to meet you.
This sounds like an awesome project it would be fun to get it going. I think it would be good from an OpenFlexure point of view to keep a separation between two types of educational resource (while both fully open):
- Resources that explain the design thinking behind the core OpenFlexure Microscope design (this is useful for all of those “buy why is it like this” questions, it is also useful for those who plan to take the design forward into regulated markets.
- Secondly a way to document community additions. This includes changes to the design, weird and wonderful use cases, and all of the science behind those growing adaptations and uses.
Capturing this endless and incredibly rich data in a systematic way seems like a challenge that requires a librarian 
!@schutton!
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Oooh idea 
I’ve been chatting with Chris Hartgerink of Liberate Science about getting an OSH product case study showcased on ReeasrchEquals. This could be it!
I’ll hopefully be meeting with Chris in the next couple weeks - would you like to hop on that call @jbrennerFIT and @julianstirling ?
The reason why I’m so keen to get an OSH case study on the platform: all part of my mission to make open source hardware as much of a household name as open science. By getting more case studies out there/connected with (OPEN) scholarly publishing platforms, more progress is made toward getting OSH-related terminology into the indexing codex. 
@schutton: When discussions don’t interfere with classes or meetings or aren’t in the middle of my sleep at night, I plan to participate as a community catalyst.
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I’d be happy to join a call if I have availability. I think the value of the publishing platform would be a unique way to store the OKH.
The biggest weakness of OKH is its current form is that it sits in a repository, it is rarely updated, but every fork, every branch, every commit, every tag in that same repository has another copy of the OKH How do you de-duplicate them in a meaningful way!?
Perhaps if we could publish and OKH to a platform when a milestone is reached this might make more sense. It could then get a DOI or something unique to that manifest. I am thinking you might publish:
- On release of a stable version of a project
- For the version used in a specific paper
- For a derivative of the original project
It should then be checked that the manifest is actually pointing at the true source at the correct time rather than at repository that is continuously changing.
@hoijui this is definitely a thread of interest on the de-duping front!
Assigning a DOI hasn’t come into the conversation (that I know of) yet for an established/wrapped project bundle. That is a very interesting concept - what say you @max_w ?
This is something we did with the OpenFlexure Microscope for releases. We didn’t do the DIO for the OKH specifically, we just packaged up the entire project and archived it on Zenodo to get a DOI
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I never created one. isn’t it quite a hassle to create one?
can it be done programmatically?
To be honest, so far, I have not seen the use in it. It could be an alternative data- format for a release (instead of a URL).
… sorry… only read the last two messages.
It can certainly be done programmatically. I am not sure what the registration process is for being able to assign DOIs. I know that we can programmatically push to Zenodo and they auto-generate us a DOI.
I am not sure if it is free to register as an assigner of DOIs.
I just checked with the DOI Foundation website. There are a number of Registration Agencies. An organisation can affiliate with a Registration Agency to assign DOIs.
Looking at mEDRA we would need to contact them to know how much it would cost to assign through them.
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I am circling in on a time to meet with Chris next week (Mar 30); would you like to be included on that conversation/meeting @jbrennerFIT or receive updates following?
It will be following up on our previous conversation to provide a use case/case study for open hardware projects (design files) for integration into the ResearchEquals.com model.
As long as any meeting is after 3/27/2023, I am up for it.
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Excellent, you’re on, @jbrennerFIT !
Also, some really interesting news… ResearchEquals is attracting the attention of one of the most well-known/problematic (depending on who you talk to) publications:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00861-0
For those keen on modularised publishing platforms as opportunity to make scholarly publishing more accessible/equitable, Octopus is another interesting space to check out. 