Inspiring Stories

Taking Open Science ideas and putting them into practice is a challenge. Even at institutional level there are many different stakeholders with different motivations and challenges who need to support Open Science initiatives. At a national level, these challenges are even greater with many institutions and governing bodies needing to find common ground. This is a challenge that has been taken up in the ORION project and the Czech partner CEITEC - the Central European Institute of Technology, set about changing the way that their institution engaged in Open Science.

A major goal of the ORION project was to open a funding call that encouraged different stakeholders to come together and present new and innovate ways to make science more accessible and participatory. The overall aim of this funding call was to support long-term collaboration between unusual/different stakeholders.

Embedding institutional change is a challenging process that requires the buy-in from diverse groups of stakeholders. The ORION partner Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Spain had the ambitious goal of embedding Responsible Research and Innovation, RRI, right at the heart of the institution so that it would filter through into all of their research practices and projects.

Long-lived institutional change has always been one of the goals of ORION. It’s relatively easy to find and convince like-minded people that responsible research and innovation (RRI) is important. However, in order to bring about real change, it’s important to engage with people all the way through an institution. Only then can true institutional change become a reality.

Genigma is a citizen science project funded by ORION and led by Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico at Centre for Genomic Regulation (CNAG-CRG). The goal of this 2-years project was to co-create with citizens a game for smartphones to accelerate cancer research.

In 2018, as a part of the ORION Open Science project, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, MDC, held pilot training workshops on Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation. The pilots were to form the basis of an ambitious schedule of workshops run during the ORION project as well as inform the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Open Science for the Life Sciences, that remains available after the end of ORION.

This booklet is a compilation of 12 inspiring stories which capture the "EUREKA moment" and highlight successes and learnings from activities conducted during the ORION Open Science project. The stories showcase a variety of different engagement and Open Science aspects: citizen science, co-creation, public dialogues, public engagement, RRI, science communication and training. Each story showcase examples on the impact, in some cases the attitude change, and the positive effect that the ORION activity had on a person, a process, an organisation and even a country.

Genigma is one of the two citizen science projects that has received funding from the ORION Open Science project. The Genigma project, managed by CNAG-CRG, is developing a game to explore the genomic alterations in cancer cells. The idea of the game is the result of a collaboration between the scientific team and a group of citizens who have participated in co-creation events previous to the game development.

Online education is now more popular and essential than ever. Students are supplementing, and during the pandemic even replacing, their in-person education with online lectures and professionals are taking advantage of the convenience to learn new skills online. One example of an online course format is the MOOC which stands for Massive Open Online Course and has become popular among universities who put courses online for anyone to take, free of charge.

Talking about pollution on a global level is important, but for communities, it is equally important to understand and discuss how pollution is affecting their local environment. Protecting areas of local natural beauty is crucial in local communities, but this is difficult to achieve if people don’t know about the environmental threats that their local area faces. Klára Vaculíková from Brno University technology designed a project to engage school classes who helped to monitor levels of the water pollutant phosphorus in the Moravský kras which is a spectacular natural limestone feature to the north of Brno. This project was funded as part of a co-creation call from the ORION partner JCMM.