Welcome in team

Thanks to an incoming Fellowship provided by the BUA, we are pleased to announce that Pen-Yuan Hsing will join the Open.Make team for the last six months of the project.

Pen background

If you have been active in the open science communities (especially GOSH, the Turing way book, or TOPS), his name will be very familiar to you. Pen worked with Robert in the OpenNext EU project, and met Julien in Geneva for the [heroes workshop[(REF)].

Dr. Pen-Yuan Hsing (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5394-879X) is a highly multidisciplinary researcher who worked on projects with diverse colleagues from ecologists, engineers, psychologists, to geographers. Through these experiences, he learned that academic researchers – regardless of subject area – face common, systemic problems such as the pressure to publish or perish, and precarious contracts with punishing workloads. This is why his postdoctoral work focuses on “research on research,” applying academic rigour to solving these common problems. His goal is to help create a healthier research culture that benefits not just himself, but also his fellow researchers.  His approach to tackling these challenges is to foster research institutions which encourage open science. To that end, he held an advisory role for the NASA Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission; and worked with UNESCO on developing and implementing their Recommendation on Open Science such as leading on policy guidance for member states (https://doi.org/10.54677/LUMO4515). He was also experienced in developing open science training, such as editing a Guide to Reproducible code for scientists or receiving certification from the Creative Commons on open source licensing practices. In addition, he participated in and led open source tech communities for more than a decade. Currently, he is a board member of the Open Science Hardware Foundation (OSHF), which advocates for OSH in open science policies.

The incoming fellowship project

In order to strengthen the OSH center of competence concept, Pen will have three important tasks:

1. Strengthen link to libraries: Pen will be responsible to pilot a library carpentry course on OSH targeted to librarians. A first version of this course was developed by Julieta Arancio, who is an alumni of Open.Make. She was indeed also an incoming fellow in the project.

2. Help testing the OSHCoC role in facilitating participatory research: Pen will help Julien to run two workshops in participator research settings. This will be done in collaboration with the looplab collective

3. Research on the connection between OSH and manufacturing. Using interview and surveys, Pen will investigates the different options available for OSH project to manufacture the hardware, as well as ways to involve manufacturers earlier in the OSH design process itself.