Introducing readiness scales for effective reuse of open source hardware

Open source hardware (OSH) describes physical products that allow for "anyone to study, modify, produce, and distribute them". While OSH principles aim to support design reuse, recent studies have challenged whether this is properly applied in practice. Therefore, this article delivers an assessment scheme that allows to identify the readiness of OSH designs for reuse. Testing the scheme on OSH ventilator designs collected by the Publnv ventilator project showed overall good usefulness of the scheme and emphasised the need of unambiguous assessment scales based on common standards. Less than two thirds of Publnv's listed projects fulfilled minimum criteria for openness.