Policy Makers

“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.

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.

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.

In this Live Chat on 3 September, Dr Emma Harris, of MDC and Dr Ann Grand, from Wellcome Trust discussed what Open Science is all about, why it's important and what are the concerns and expectations.

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.