RRI

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.

Citizen science relies on active participation in the research process. But many projects have had to be put on hold due to Covid-19 restrictions affecting the involvement of participants. SMOVE – “Science that makes me move”, a project engaging school pupils to research the relationship between environmental influences and sedentary behaviour, has been rethinking its approach in light of constraints.

The dangerous life of the couch potato: People who spend too long sitting are at higher risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. In the citizen science project SMOVE, the ORION partner MDC is joining forces with schoolchildren to research the relationship between environmental influences and sedentary behavior.

One frequent argument that is made by researchers and Open Science advocates alike is that changes to the scientific process need to come from where the rewards are: funding. However, any shifts in how funding applications are assessed and what types of research practices are rewarded are unlikely to happen...

The ORION partner JCMM will award 10 grants of €5000 to master and doctorate students from universities in Brno, who will present their innovative projects with the Open Science attributes within the framework of "local societal challenges“. Registration is open until 15 January 2019.

The ORION partner South Moravian Centre for International Mobility, JCMM in Czech Republic has granted ten innovative projects €5.000 each, which were selected from their regional call for open science projects on local societal challenges. The call was open for master and doctoral students from local universities in Brno and 45 project proposals were received.

The winners of the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Health Awards, organized by the ORION partner Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) has been announced. Three winning proposals from three different Spanish Health Research Institutes (IIS) have been awarded 10,000 euros each in this first edition of the RRI Health Awards, out of a total of 26 proposals received. The winning projects were Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute in Barcelona, the Maimonides Biomedical Research Institute of Cordoba and the Fundación Jiménez Díaz University Hospital Health Research Institute in Madrid, focus on citizen participation, science education and ethics, respectively. The call was open to Spanish Health Research Institutes that have developed significant institutional RRI activities during 2019.

In order to engage the public in science and design effective citizen science projects, it is important to understand the main motivations that drive individuals to engage in research. A pan-European study by the EU ORION Open Science project has revealed gender and age differences when it comes to the reasons that motivate members of the public to get involved in life sciences research.

On Thursday 11 March the ORION partners hosted an online event to share the findings of ORION public dialogues on genome editing with relevant stakeholders in the research community. The findings are detailed in the corresponding reports of each of the countries where the dialogues were conducted during 2019-2020: the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Czech Republic. The objective of the dialogues was to explore public attitudes towards the use of genome editing technology in fundamental life sciences research in order to inform research organisations when and how to engage the public with emerging technologies.

Welcome to the online launch event of the findings of the ORION public dialogue on genome editing on 11 March at 14:00-16:00 CET. The public dialogues which were conducted in the Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and the UK during 2019/2020 sought to explore public attitudes to fundamental life sciences research when revolutionary genome editing technologies are used in order to understand when and how to engage audiences with emerging technologies. The dialogue also sought to understand how public engagement strategies might differ between countries.