Doctors & Patients

A major goal of the ORION project was to open a funding call that encouraged different stakeholders to come together and present new and innovate ways to make science more accessible and participatory. The overall aim of this funding call was to support long-term collaboration between unusual/different stakeholders.

The ORION Open Science Podcast started as a way to communicate with new audiences. For science to be open, information has to be accessible, and taking advantage of this unique audio medium was too good an opportunity to pass up. The podcast officially launched with episode one in 2019 and is now in its second season with the podcast hosts Luiza Bengtsson and Zoe Ingram who have deep dive discussions with experts on a wide variety of topics related to Open Science.

A public dialogue is a qualitative research process during which public audiences interact with a variety of experts to deliberate on issues relevant to future strategy or policy decisions. A public dialogue provides an opportunity for organisations to gather public views to inform their activities so that they are aligned with society, particularly relevant for publicly funded research organisations.

The ORION public dialogues on genome editing were conducted in the UK, Germany, Czech Republic and Sweden during 2019 and 2020 and organized by Ipsos MORI in collaboration with the ORION Project. The dialogues sought to explore public attitudes to fundamental life sciences research when revolutionary genome editing technologies are used in order to inform research organisations about when and how to engage audiences with emerging technologies. A report is available for each of the countries the public dialogue events were held in, as well as an overarching report which synthesises findings from across all the events

Online education is now more popular and essential than ever. Students are supplementing, and during the pandemic even replacing, their in-person education with online lectures and professionals are taking advantage of the convenience to learn new skills online. One example of an online course format is the MOOC which stands for Massive Open Online Course and has become popular among universities who put courses online for anyone to take, free of charge.

Embedding institutional change is a challenging process that requires the buy-in from diverse groups of stakeholders. The ORION partner Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Spain had the ambitious goal of embedding Responsible Research and Innovation, RRI, right at the heart of the institution so that it would filter through into all of their research practices and projects.

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.