Reports & papers

Since its commitment to the Open Responsible research and Innovation principles, the CRG has been exploring ways to incorporate the views and ideas of civil society and different stakeholders into their 2021-2024 research strategy. During 2020 the institute therefore conducted a Public Dialogue with two fundamental goals.

The objective of this document is to use this experience to create a simple guide on how to carry out a public dialogue for a scientific research centre. The guidelines are based on the methodology and learnings from a public dialogue conducted to inform the Centre for Genomic Regulation's (CRG) strategy.

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 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.

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 ORION project seeks to promote institutional change in life science research performing and research funding organisations by performing co-creation experiments in three specific areas where stakeholders do not already frequently collaborate; (i) Research strategy and funding, (ii) identifying risks and opportunities presented by disruptive technologies and (iii) citizen science...

A reality TV experiment, augmented reality app, smartphone game and citizen deliberation forum. These are just a few of the stakeholder engagement initiatives highlighted in the paper "Involving society in science" published in EMBO press (Volume 22, Issue 11, 4 November 2021). In this paper we discuss different levels of stakeholder engagement by way of example, presenting various activities organized by European research institutions. Based on these experiences, we propose ten reflection points that we believe should be considered by the institutions, the scientists, and the funding agencies to achieve meaningful and impactful stakeholder engagement.

Nowadays, the prevailing trend in the science-society relationship is to engage with the broader public, which is beneficial for the public, scientific institutes, scientific findings, and the legitimacy of science as a whole. This article Open Science and the Science-Society Relationship published on Springer 24 June, 2019 provides a broad review of the rapidly growing research on Open Science and identifies the gaps in the current knowledge for future research. The review focuses on the science-society relationship, such that knowledge from this field is summarised and systematised. Insight into the most salient topics, including science communication, public engagement with science, public cognition of science, and challenges and potential unintended consequences connected to interactions with the public are examined.

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.

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.