Civil Society Organizations

The ORION partner South Moravian Centre for International Mobility JCMM in Czechia, has received 45 project proposals in their regional call for open science projectson local societal challenges. The call was open for masters and doctoral students from local universities in Brno. The project proposals are now open for public peer review on the Authorea platform. Ten of the received proposals will receive grants of €5000.

Are you searching for a fun way to learn more about Open Science? The brand new ORION Open Science Podcast is now available. The ORION Open Science podcast is structured around a series of interviews with interesting guest about a variety of topics related to Open Science. Tune in for Episode 1 with Dr Janet Metcalfe from Vitae.

Dr. Emma Martinez-Sanchez, Public Engagement Project Officer for ORION Open Science at the Babraham Institute, brought the ORION project to the Engage Conference poster party and found inspiration elsewhere…

The questionnaire used in the online quantitative ORION Open Science self-assessment study is now available and free to use to support other research funding and performing organisations to carry out self-assessment activities. The study which examined the views and practices of Open Science in the ORION partner institutions was developed and carried out by the Centre for Research in Science and Mathematics Education (CRECIM).

Citizen Science offers great opportunities for the public to participate in the research process themselves, instead of merely being informed of research results. In two pilot Citizen Science projects being supported by ORION Open Science, citizens will actively contribute to a research study to assemble cancer genomes in 3D by playing the Genigma video game and young people will be monitoring their daily activity to inform future health research in the SMOVE project.

Genome editing tools such as CRISPR are beginning to reshape the physical world around us, one base pair at a time. As an Artist in Residence in labs at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) and at STATE Studio, Emilia Tikka explored how this could affect society in the future and created the exhibition “AEON - Trajectories of Longevity and CRISPR”. The project was funded by the ORION project.

Engaging with multiple stakeholders in "co-creation” experiments to explore different ways to make scientific research more participatory is at heart of the ORION project. During the coming months national stakeholder workshops on Open Science will be held in the ORION partner countries. First in line was Czechia where the ORION partner CEITEC hosted a national stakeholder workshop on 25 September. The aim with the workshop was to put forward recommendations for the national priorities on Open Science.

The answer to this question is by incorporating different views in problem solving processes. This is precisely what we sought to explore during the ORION workshop on genome editing research at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF 2018) in July. With over 4,000 delegates, ESOF is the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe and was the perfect place for this experiment, offering a unique opportunity for interaction and debate with scientists, innovators, policy makers, business people and citizens.

Who hasn’t heard about genome editing in the last few years? With over 10.000 PubMed entries, it is unsurprising that the scientific community and beyond are familiar with the term. The latest tool in the genome editing kit, CRISPR-Cas, allows scientists to make changes in the genetic material of a cell or an entire organism in a way that is easier, cheaper and faster than any previous genome editing technology.

Our report "Public attitudes to life sciences research in six European countries" shows that interest in life sciences research is generally high among citizens and that the three most accepted purposes of using genome editing are related to the medical field. 6000 persons were interviewed in this pan-European study which was led by the ORION partners VA in Sweden and CEITEC in the Czech Republic.