The Czech partner JCMM held a workshop on Open Science for university students on 29th November. The aim of the workshop was to acquaint interested students with the ORION project, the principles for Open Science and the new call for Open Science projects which was recently launched by JCMM. The event was hosted by the Brno Urban Centre and attended by potential applicants from almost all eligible Brno universities.

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.

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.

What research future do scientists want to see? At the pilot of the ORION Open Science Training Workshop participants were asked not only to imagine that future, but also to expand on how it could become a reality. The ideas the scientists came up with mapped very closely to the tools and principles of the Open Science movement. For example, one group identified barrier-free sharing of data between scientists to speed up research.

The teaser for Emilia Tikka's speculative artwork based on concepts of genome editing is available here . © Emilia Tikka Emilia Tikka has spent the last two months as the Artist in Residence at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC). She has been working closely...

Who hasn’t heard about genome editing in the last few years? With over 10.000 PubMed entries, it is unsurprising that the scientific community and beyond are familiar with the term. The latest tool in the genome editing kit, CRISPR-Cas, allows scientists to make changes in the genetic material of a cell or an entire organism in a way that is easier, cheaper and faster than any previous genome editing technology.

Our report "Public attitudes to life sciences research in six European countries" shows that interest in life sciences research is generally high among citizens and that the three most accepted purposes of using genome editing are related to the medical field. 6000 persons were interviewed in this pan-European study which was led by the ORION partners VA in Sweden and CEITEC in the Czech Republic.