E-Mail The COVID-19 pandemic has seen hardware developers clamouring to make 'open source' technology to support our frontline services. Their intentions have been honourable - an invitation to teams across the world to collaborate in developing essential equipment such as ventilators, thereby making the process of producing critical instruments more effective, both in time and cost. In practice, however, most developers of hardware have shown little 'openness' in their sharing of designs, a fact lamented by a group of physicists from the University of Bath in the UK, in a paper published this week in The Design Journal. According to the group, the pandemic has highlighted serious flaws in a system that forces research groups around the world to start from scratch every time a tweak needs to be made to an existing instrument, simply because they can't get their hands on the original designs.