Business & Industry

The first co-creation event of the Citizen Science project Genigma kick-started at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona in January where close to 40 participants engaged with their most creative ideas to develop an app to discover the genomic alterations in cancer cells. Genigma is one of the two Citizen Science projects that has received funding from the ORION project.

How do you trigger institutional, cultural and behavioural changes in research organizations to foster open science and RRI? The ORION project is exploring these questions. In the TEAM ZBW Mediatalk interview, Dr. Michela Bertero and Dr. Luiza Bengtsson give some details on the projects goals, actions and learnings on fostering open science and responsible research and innovation (RRI).

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…

Live forever thanks to CRISPR? The artist Emilia Tikka was a guest at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin and her work focused on the question: What if the CRISPR-Cas9 would make us immortal? See the result in the video and visit her exhibition at STATE Studio in Berlin.

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).

The Czech partner JCMM held a workshop on Open Science for university students on 29th November. The aim of the workshop was to acquaint interested students with the ORION project, the principles for Open Science and the new call for Open Science projects which was recently launched by JCMM. The event was hosted by the Brno Urban Centre and attended by potential applicants from almost all eligible Brno universities.

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.