Doctors & Patients

Learn more about how to engage citizens with science, implement Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation in your work and organisation from our ORION YouTube channel. The video library give an overview of the different activities run during the ORION project as well as recordings from our major conferences....

The discovery of the application of CRISPR / Cas9 in eukaryotic cells has been one of the greatest advances in biotechnology in recent years, among other reasons, due to the multiple advantages it presents (compared with other genetic editing techniques), as well as due to the various possible applications and areas of research it generates. n this article, "Editar o no editar. Aquesta és la qüestió", we will discuss these challenges and explain, briefly, the ORION Open Science project, and the public dialogue initiative related to socio-scientific issues.

The RRI Health Awards are a new approach to research funding designed to integrate RRI principles into the research funding and performing process, thus “opening up” research funding. ISCIII (Instituto de Salud Carlos III), is a Spanish national funding body that developed the ‘RRI Health Awards’ to recognise, encourage, promote and disseminate best practice examples of RRI activities undertaken by its accredited Health Research Institutes during 2019. Each award is a grant of 10,000 Euros for RRI actions that have been carried out in the previous year in the field of health and biomedicine. The call was developed using a co-creation process involving multiple stakeholders. The call was open to all 31 Health Research Institutes across the Spanish territory, encompassing over 162 institutions and more than 24,000 researchers. The Health Research Institutes are entities dedicated to basic and applied research that involve hospitals within the National Health System, universities, public research organisations and public or private research centres. Each have a multidisciplinary composition and involve many different stakeholders.

The aim of the ORION Open Science was to explore ways in which research performing and research funding organisations in life sciences and biomedicine can open up the way they fund, organise and do research. During the project lifetime we have developed and tested a wide range of of engagement methods, funding schemes, training materials and co-creation activities to engage the public in science. Communication and dissemination activities have been important and integral parts for the success of the project. The open communication approach of the ORION project, involving and encouraging all partners to communicate about the project, has resulted in extensive communication activity in social media, a good number of visitors to the website, and participation in a large number of conferences and workshops. This is also reflected in the statistics of the different communication channels. This final report on dissemination activities covers all the communication and dissemination activities from the ORION project start on 1 May 2017 until the project end on 30 September 30 2021.

The aim of the ORION Open Science project is to explore ways in which research and funding organisations in life sciences and biomedicine can open up the way they fund, organise and do research, triggering institutional and cultural changes within these organisations. To highlight the ORION Open Science project activities, we organised three international workshops (online, due to the pandemic), one in June in the framework of an international conference and two in September 2021. The objectives of the ORION final workshops were the following: To share theORION activities, including co-creation and citizen science activities and projects, as well as trainings. To disseminate the experience and lessons gained throughout the project. To discuss ways to further implement RRI and Open Science on institutional, national and European level. The workshops were targeted at representatives from research performing and funding organisations, science engagement practitioners, high-level national and international expert stakeholders, policy makers, science engagement managers and practitioners as well as other EU-funded projects. This deliverable 6.5 Report on the final international workshops consists of a comprehensive report about the ORION final workshops including description of the events, programmes and contributors, evaluation and feedback from the participants, as well as communication and promotion activities.

One key objective of the ORION project was to foster institutional changes in Open Science at research perfoming organisations, RFPOs, through co-creation experiments with multiple stakeholders, which can last beyond the ORION lifetime. The six participating RFPOs: Babraham Institute, CEITEC, CRG, MDC, ISCIII and JCMM have prepared tailored action plans to embed Open Science and RRI in their organisations. The plans have been elaborated engaging high management in the organisations to ensure institutional commitment and resources for their implementation. They focus on different dimensions of Open Science, depending on the institution's priorities – from Open Access to publications, Open Data, research integrity, EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) aspects, to stakeholder and public engagement, incorporating the lessons learnt in ORION.

The outreach and dissemination Work Package, WP6, was led by VA (Public & Science) and set the framework for project communication through the Dissemination and Communication Plan, by giving communication support to the other WPs, by communicating and disseminating project information through different channels and by promoting the project objectives and activities to relevant stakeholders including policy makers. A variety of communication channels, such as: website, newsletter, social media and podcasts, have been used to achieve the objectives. This midterm communication report covers communication and dissemination activities and the WP6 tasks conducted from the start of the project on May 1, 2017 until 31 March 2019.

The Final Evaluation and Quality Report of the ORION Open Science project gives an overview of all the project activities and learnings. The report is organized in three parts: A general introduction to the project, presenting ORION strategies and actions as well as overall statistics on the participating experts and citizens. The Evaluation report, presenting the main results arisen from the efforts devoted to the Work Package 5 focused on evaluating ORION training actions in Open Science and multiple co-creation experiments. The Quality report, showing the strategies, channels and results promoted by the ORION Management team to ensure the successful implementation of the project. Through the document, links are provided to the ORION website where the public deliverables are accessible for the reader to find out further details on the evaluations that were carried out.

The aim of sub-task 3.2.1 was to develop new and revised approaches to research funding. The two research funding partners in ORION, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, ISCIII, Spain, and the South Moravian Center for International Mobility, JCMM, Czech Republic, worked together and took complementary approaches to explore integration of RRI principles in funding processes, co-creating funding calls with multiple stakeholders, thus ‘opening-up’ the research funding engine. ISCIII designed the RRI Health Awards to reward those institutions that implement the RRI dimensions in their institutions, and JCMM designed and ran a student competition on Open Science projects for the Brno universities.

Supporting Novel Co-creation Initiatives (ORION task 3.5, D3.11 Report on the implementation of novel co-creation initiatives) sought to support making research funding and performing institutions more permeable to Responsible Research and Innovation principles by encouraging collaboration of Core and Associated ORION partners with stakeholders in the quadruple helix. This report summarises the learnings during the first two phases of this task: the design and dissemination of the funding call; and the evaluation and selection of successful proposals.