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Fifteen representatives from the research community, business sector, policy makers and civil society organisations, gathered in Brussels in April to co-design a new call for co-creation activities within the ORION project. The goal of the interactive workshop was to generate ideas on what the new funding call would look like, what types of projects to fund and who could participate. The new ORION co-creation call will be launched in June.

“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.

“For research to be really impactful, the public has to be involved. They need to understand the research and we need to help to connect the research to what people care about,” says Imran Khan, Head of Public Engagement at Wellcome Trust in the UK, at the Science Communication Forum in Gothenburg. But do the public wish to be involved in science?

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.

How do you trigger institutional, cultural and behavioural changes in research organizations to foster open science and RRI? The ORION project is exploring these questions. In the TEAM ZBW Mediatalk interview, Dr. Michela Bertero and Dr. Luiza Bengtsson give some details on the projects goals, actions and learnings on fostering open science and responsible research and innovation (RRI).

The ORION partner South Moravian Centre for International Mobility JCMM in Czechia, has received 45 project proposals in their regional call for open science projectson local societal challenges. The call was open for masters and doctoral students from local universities in Brno. The project proposals are now open for public peer review on the Authorea platform. Ten of the received proposals will receive grants of €5000.

Are you searching for a fun way to learn more about Open Science? The brand new ORION Open Science Podcast is now available. The ORION Open Science podcast is structured around a series of interviews with interesting guest about a variety of topics related to Open Science. Tune in for Episode 1 with Dr Janet Metcalfe from Vitae.

Dr. Emma Martinez-Sanchez, Public Engagement Project Officer for ORION Open Science at the Babraham Institute, brought the ORION project to the Engage Conference poster party and found inspiration elsewhere…

Live forever thanks to CRISPR? The artist Emilia Tikka was a guest at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin and her work focused on the question: What if the CRISPR-Cas9 would make us immortal? See the result in the video and visit her exhibition at STATE Studio in Berlin.

The questionnaire used in the online quantitative ORION Open Science self-assessment study is now available and free to use to support other research funding and performing organisations to carry out self-assessment activities. The study which examined the views and practices of Open Science in the ORION partner institutions was developed and carried out by the Centre for Research in Science and Mathematics Education (CRECIM).