Education Community

That’s what we hope to find out through a series of public dialogues on genome editing in the ORION partnering countries Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and the UK. The aim with the public dialogues is to discuss the risks and opportunities of disruptive technologies and identify any concerns the public might have.

The registration for the ORION MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for Open Science in the Life Sciences has now opened. This brand new online course will help researchers to share their science with the world! Easily digestible modules will explore different aspects of Open Science and allow researchers in life sciences to gain a certificate in Open Science.

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.

The ORION project has launched a funding call for novel co-creation initiatives to open up research in life sciences and biomedicine. This call will provide funding of up to 100,000€ for a project that brings together a variety of different participants from across a range of sectors to co-create a new project or product based around life sciences research.

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.

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.

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.