Research Hardware Publications Should Help Build Communities, Careers and Better Hardware

Based on the interviews of fifteen contributors in research hardware projects, we shed lights onto the motivations of research hardware engineers to use a hardware publication platform, and derived some high-level features that such a platform should have. Our analysis suggests that the main objectives of the authors are to find their readership and grow an inclusive community of contributors, producers and users around their project. Inclusivity requires the recognition of different types of contributions and a system free of financial or language barriers for authors and readers. They also appear interested in getting feedback on their work, in order to make the hardware better and learn during that process. The creation of a research output that is recognized by the academic system is also important both for their career and for developing their community. In addition, they express wishes for a publication system integrated in their hardware documentation workflow , as well as a system which would be pleasant or even fun to use. Importantly, a research hardware publication ecosystem should link archived and living versions of the hardware project and consider the project as a whole, providing documentation on both the hardware product and the development process.