citizen science

Funding initiative: ORION Citizen Science Call The H2020 ORION project has opened a call for grant proposals on citizen science to support research activities in life sciences and biomedicine that enable scientists and citizens to work together with the ultimate goal to generate new scientific knowledge, using collectively their expertise,...

If you had not heard of Open Science and wondered what it was, or wished there was an Open Science topic you knew more about, then the ORION Open Science Cafe on 4 November during Berlin Science Week was the perfect event.

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?

“The ORION Open Science project has helped CEITEC both internally to introduce new processes within our institute, and externally to lead the way to Open Science in Central and Eastern Europe” said Jiri Nantl, Director of CEITEC Masaryk University in his welcome speech at the ORION Open Science 2ndAnnual meeting which took place in Brno, Czech Republic on 6-7 May 2019. All ORION partners and associate partners gathered to share and exchange knowledge and experience from project activities such as: stakeholder dialogues on Open Science, Citizen Science projects, public engagement and trainings conducted during the first two years of the project.

The ORION citizen science project Genigma project has been selected as part of a NEWSERA initiative to increase the uptake of citizen science projects among academic researchers across the EU. This coincides with the launch of the Genigma game app which has been in development for two years by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).

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.

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.

The RRING network, the NewHoRRIzon and the ORION Open Science project recently held an online interactive roundtable on 3 September as part of the Euroscience Open Forum, ESOF 2020 on "Joining forces for a global 21st century Responsible Research and Innovation Network". We are now inviting you to get involved and have your say!

How can you establish cultural change? How do you implement and embed Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in your organisation? These are the questions that the ORION project aims to answer. From the start of the project in 2017, ORION has been exploring how to establish an open dialogue with society on relevant research topics, such as genome editing, and has been developing new ways and collaborations between researchers and the general public. Co-creation is at heart of the ORION project.

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.