Engineering standards are another area where access is a major barrier for small scale engineering practice. Engineering standards consist of a set of criteria intended to ensure the proper execution of engineering design as well as adherence to the proper safety specifications. In general standards provide, well... standardization. The trouble with many engineering standards is that they can be expensive to purchase, often in the range of $400-500, for example. This raises the same access issues as with anything else that carries such an expense.

While I have no expectations of being able to tackle all of the aforementioned, I hope that between myself and the colleagues I work with, we can make a small dent in the practice of open engineering. To that end, I have organized an umbrella initiative called openENGR under which I organize the various projects that we have undertaken to promote the overarching goals of the breadth of engineering work more accessible to others and make the process of practicing openness in engineering easier for engineering researchers and practitioners. 

Current projects under this initiative include the Journal of Open Engineering (TJOE), a work in collaboration with PubPub out of the MIT Media Lab, and engrXiv, the engineering archive, an eprint server for engineering built in collaboration with the Center for Open Science on their platform, the Open Science Framework. Future efforts may include OERs for engineering.