The 69th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar took place on Thursday, May 23, 2024 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (CEST). Our speaker Julieta Arancio talked on how changes in science policy in the last decade turned advocacy for open science into institutional strategies, new role descriptions and more infrastructure for enabling broader access to scientific knowledge. Most of these open science strategies at research institutions focus on open access to publications, open research data and, exceptionally, research software. This seminar focused on open hardware, an emerging area of open science which was included in the global 2021 UNESCO Recommendation. After introducing the concept, main initiatives and latest news in the field, the potential and limitations of open hardware to make open science more reproducible, efficient and equitable were discussed.