New and Revised Approaches to Research Funding (ORION subtask 3.2.1) sought to integrate RRI principles in funding processes, co-creating funding calls with multiple stakeholders, thus ‘opening- up’ research funding. Research funding organisations that participated in this ORION task, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Spain and the South Moravian Centre for International Mobility (JCMM) in Czech Republic, organised and led workshops with multiple stakeholders. Their co-creation experiments resulted in two complementary approaches: The RRI Health Awards (ISCIII) and a funding call for undergraduate research projects to address local societal challenges (JCMM).
The implementation of this task at ISCIII has succeeded in making the organisation more permeable for internal collaboration, displaying best practices on how to overcome typical challenges in hierarchical research funding organisations. The impact of the task at the institutional level has been acknowledging the RRI principles in the 2019 Accreditation Guide for ISCIII-funded Health Research Institutes, a milestone that ISCIII Director, Raquel Yotti, highlighted in the foreword in the annual memory. In the case of JCMM, their facilitation and coordination of ten Open Science research projects has elevated the organisation as an Open Science authority in the Czech Republic.
At the time of writing this report, both ISCIII and JCMM foresaw a reiteration of their open science approaches in the future, supported with local funds and institutional project management resources. A replication of ORION fostered approaches would provide an undisputable proof of impact of this ORION task at the institutional level. ISCIII has planned an evaluation of the impact of the first edition in the first quarter of 2021 before progressing with the second edition of the awards. The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected JCMM, with part of its core funding being cut, and the initiative there has been put on halt until further notice.