Doctors & Patients

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.

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.

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).

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.

Genome editing tools such as CRISPR are beginning to reshape the physical world around us, one base pair at a time. As an Artist in Residence in labs at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) and at STATE Studio, Emilia Tikka explored how this could affect society in the future and created the exhibition “AEON - Trajectories of Longevity and CRISPR”. The project was funded by the ORION project.

Engaging with multiple stakeholders in "co-creation” experiments to explore different ways to make scientific research more participatory is at heart of the ORION project. During the coming months national stakeholder workshops on Open Science will be held in the ORION partner countries. First in line was Czechia where the ORION partner CEITEC hosted a national stakeholder workshop on 25 September. The aim with the workshop was to put forward recommendations for the national priorities on Open Science.

The answer to this question is by incorporating different views in problem solving processes. This is precisely what we sought to explore during the ORION workshop on genome editing research at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF 2018) in July. With over 4,000 delegates, ESOF is the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe and was the perfect place for this experiment, offering a unique opportunity for interaction and debate with scientists, innovators, policy makers, business people and citizens.