Business & Industry

Taking Open Science ideas and putting them into practice is a challenge. Even at institutional level there are many different stakeholders with different motivations and challenges who need to support Open Science initiatives. At a national level, these challenges are even greater with many institutions and governing bodies needing to find common ground. This is a challenge that has been taken up in the ORION project and the Czech partner CEITEC - the Central European Institute of Technology, set about changing the way that their institution engaged in Open Science.

The ORION ‘Train-the-Trainer’ course was developed to help Open Science advocates and stakeholders learn from the training that has been delivered throughout the project and equip them with the skills to run their own training. The online course was created on OpenLearnCreate, a platform created and hosted by the Open...

The UK recently lost its measles eradication status, leading to urgent calls for action and making vaccination an important and timely issue with the potential for far-reaching impact. Meanwhile, the current Covid-19 pandemic and the discovery of a vaccine has renewed interest in and fear of vaccinations. The ORION VACCINE project aims to create together with young people a digital game, the Virus Fighter, and engagement tool for engaging the public with the science behind vaccinations, infections and the immune system.

Genigma is one of the two citizen science projects that has received funding from the ORION Open Science project. The Genigma project, managed by CNAG-CRG, is developing a game to explore the genomic alterations in cancer cells. The idea of the game is the result of a collaboration between the scientific team and a group of citizens who have participated in co-creation events previous to the game development.

Talking about pollution on a global level is important, but for communities, it is equally important to understand and discuss how pollution is affecting their local environment. Protecting areas of local natural beauty is crucial in local communities, but this is difficult to achieve if people don’t know about the environmental threats that their local area faces. Klára Vaculíková from Brno University technology designed a project to engage school classes who helped to monitor levels of the water pollutant phosphorus in the Moravský kras which is a spectacular natural limestone feature to the north of Brno. This project was funded as part of a co-creation call from the ORION partner JCMM.

Can art help to explain scientific concepts? During the course of the ORION project, artist Emilia Tikka designed an art piece to represent a possible future scenario where it was possible to prevent aging using genome editing. The art piece was produced by Tikka while she was on a residency with the ORION partner, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. There she spent time in a molecular biology lab and developed the concept for her art piece titled “ÆON - Trajectories of Longevity and CRISPR.”

“Ideas MELting pot for TIC and Health Science for Citizens in Small communities” - MELTIC will improve the quality of life for EU citizens in small communities by co-creating and developing ICT health services with stakeholders including local residents.

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.

Join our Citizen Science project and become a genome explorer! The Genigma project aims to study the genomic alterations in cancer cells. As a start, we will study breast cancer cells obtained from cell cultures in our laboratory. To analyse the differences between healthy and cancerous cells means to scan...

In order to engage the public in science and design effective citizen science projects, it is important to understand the main motivations that drive individuals to engage in research. The paper "The motivation for citizens' involvement in life sciences research is predicted by age and gender by the ORION partners CEITEC, CRG and VA was published on 3 August, 2020 in in PLOSONE. The findings are based on the ORION study "Public attitudes to life sciences research in six European countriess which was designed to map citizens' expectations regarding science to inform and support research organisations on how to engage with the general public.