The aim of sub-task 3.2.1 was to develop new and revised approaches to research funding. The two research funding partners in ORION, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, ISCIII, Spain, and the South Moravian Center for International Mobility, JCMM, Czech Republic, worked together and took complementary approaches to explore integration of RRI principles in funding processes, co-creating funding calls with multiple stakeholders, thus ‘opening-up’ the research funding engine. ISCIII designed the RRI Health Awards to reward those institutions that implement the RRI dimensions in their institutions, and JCMM designed and ran a student competition on Open Science projects for the Brno universities.
ISCIII organized co-creation experiments that gave the opportunity to take into account different points of view from Stakeholders in different areas in order to work together on institutional changes. As a result, the call text for the RRI Health Prize has been amended in the Grant Agreement of ORION, to better reflect the objective of this prize: to recognise, encourage, promote and disseminate best practice examples on RRI aspects developed in 2019 by the Health Research Institutes. These Institutes accredited by the ISCIII will assure the excellence of the proposals to be submitted and constitute the leverage of more than 162 institutions, 24,000 researchers and 31 Health Research Institutes for all over the Spanish regions. The official pre-announcement of the call will be in May 2019. Three prizes of 10.000 € each will be awarded in 2020, for efforts on RRI from these Health Research Institutes in the course of 2019.
JCMM aimed to provide support to students with a chance to become more professional in Open Science. Two meetings were held in June and October 2018, during which they defined the domains of the local societal challenges. The eligible applicants were master and PhD students. The call was open for two months, followed by two-step review. In the first stage, they had set up a public peer review on the Authorea platform, but the participation by the public was poor. In the second stage, they organized an expert review with two experts per project. They received 45 eligible applications from three universities. In mid-April the 10 winners have been announced. These students have now 9 months to finalize their projects. JCMM has used an IT JCMM system to ensure the smooth processing of all applications as well as the evaluation management. This sophisticated tool is used in JCMM for registration of all applicants, evaluators, tutors, supervisors, administrators and JCMM personnel. The novelty of the evaluation procedure is part of the co-creation procedure. The experiences that JCMM learned will be used in other activities focused on students and in designing new calls with OS elements.