Civil Society Organizations

Public dialogues, citizen science, game development, co-creation activities and action plans on open science. For 4.5 years, the ORION Open Science project consisting of 8 European partners has been testing different ways to involve the public and other stakeholders in the research process. The aim of the project was to investigate how research and funding organisations can "open up" the way they fund and do research.

A reality TV experiment, augmented reality app, smartphone game and citizen deliberation forum. These are just a few of the stakeholder engagement initiatives highlighted in a new paper on "Involving society in science" published in EMBO press (Volume 22, Issue 11, 4 November 2021). In this paper we discuss different levels of stakeholder engagement by way of example, presenting various activities organized by European research institutions. Based on these experiences, we propose ten reflection points that we believe should be considered by the institutions, the scientists, and the funding agencies to achieve meaningful and impactful stakeholder engagement.

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.

September marked the official end of the ORION Open Science EU-project and the final conference was held on 27-28 September to wrap up all of the activities, insights and opinions from very fruitful 4,5 years. The aim of the ORION project has been to trigger institutional, cultural and behavioural changes in Research Funding and Performing Organisations (RFOs and RPOs) towards Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The conference provided an opportunity to review ORION’s achievements and share key lessons and experiences to help others put open science into practice too.

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. Citizens have collaborated on the Genigma project in...

Welcome to the virtual final ORION Open Science Conference on 27-28 September to learn about and discuss achievements and lessons learned throughout the ORION project from 2017 to 2021. The conference is free of charge and open to anyone interested in Open Science and RRI practices, and its future national...

Global societal challenges together with growing public interest in science present both opportunities as well challenges for the research world. Open Science is a way to ensure that citizens are involved in research, and that the views of different stakeholders are taken into consideration when shaping science agendas and research projects. How can science communication practitioners, researchers, policy makers and research funding bodies successfully engage with the public, and ensure that their values and interests are taken into account?

Save the date for the final conference of the ORION Open Science project on 27-28 September, where we will be sharing achievements and lessons gained throughout the project . The virtual final conference is free of charge and open to anyone interested in Open Science practices and discussing its future implications in a national and international context.

To help open science up to a wider audience, ORION organised a number of public dialogues in the UK, Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic during 2019-2020. One purpose of the dialogues was to explore public attitudes to genome editing technology, which has revolutionized scientific research in the past decade and has the potential for broad societal impact. The dialogues also aimed to understand how to engage the public on disruptive technologies and how public engagement strategies could vary between countries. Information about the potential use of the technology has led to a wide variety of different opinions and reactions from the public, which are not always based on scientific fact. The empirical evidence gathered during the dialogues will provide the basis of future communications strategies within the ORION institutions.