The open hardware movement advocates the sharing of designs for material objects. For the global science community it means people can access instructions to 3D print increasingly sophisticated tools. Just as importantly, the movement is decentralizing knowledge and giving users the ability to customize scientific equipment then repair it when things go wrong.

In the latest episode of Physics World Stories, Andrew Glester meets researchers at the University of Bath who are part of the open science community.

First, social scientist Julieta Arancio discusses the open hardware movement’s origins and some impactful projects. Among them are: Open Science with Drones; GORGAS tracker for Malaria and Human Mobility in the Peruvian Amazon; and Mboa Lab, a makerspace community in Cameroon.

Later, Richard Bowman and Julian Stirling describe the journey of developing a low-cost, laboratory-grade microscope. The OpenFlexure project, developed with the University of Cambridge and partners in Tanzania, can become an important tool in the fight against malaria.