Public engagement

The ORION research funding partner in Spain, the Carlos III Health Institute (Instituto de Salud Carlos III), launched last January an award for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Health Research. The award - #RRIhealthawards, seeks to recognise, support, promote and disseminate the work of ISCIII funded Health Research Institutes to incorporate the principles of RRI in their activities and projects. The call was open to Spanish Health Research Institutes that have developed significant institutional RRI activities during 2019.

“What an exciting potential future for science!” commented one of the participants in the ORION MOOC for Open Science in Life Sciences, when discussing what they had learnt from the course. The ORION MOOC course ran for six weeks from October-November 2019 and was open for anyone interested in Open Science. A new MOOC will run again in early 2020.

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.

Open Science is about making research more accessible to society. But how do we get there and what obstacles are in the way? These were the questions raised at a seminar arranged by the ORION partner VA (Public & Science) at the Almedalen Week in Sweden on 2 July.

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, dialogue between science and society is more important than ever. This year’s EuroScience Open Forum, a hybrid of in-person and online events held 2-6 September, provided a key international platform to discuss and share experiences on issues such as communicating scientific uncertainty and maintaining public trust in science. The ORION Open Science partners contributed to three online sessions during the week discussing Open Science, RRI and genomic medicine. Did you miss the event? Some sessions are now available on YouTube.

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.

The ORION partner, the South Moravian Centre for International Mobility , JCMM , organized an Open Science Summer School for doctoral students and young researchers on 14-18 September 2020. During this very intensive week, 35 young researchers and doctoral students were given an overview of open science principles and had...

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.

The findings of the ORION public dialogue on genome editing in life sciences research were presented on 11th March 2021. The findings bring together four public dialogue events held in the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Czech Republic during 2019-2020. Case studies on the use of genome editing technology in fundamental research were used during the discussions with the public to help research organisations better understand the views of the public.

The online Engage Festival, organised by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) in the UK brought together public engagement and science communication professionals from all over the UK and the EU for discussions, knowledge exchange and networking. The ORION project ran a session to share experiences of how public dialogues could be a tool for public engagement on societal issues such as genome editing.