open science

The ORION MOOC for Open Science in the Life Sciences is now open to follow at anytime. The course is open for anyone interested in Open Science and consists of six modules covering different aspects of Open Science. Take the chance to become the next Orion Open Science Champion!

Fifteen representatives from the research community, business sector, policy makers and civil society organisations, gathered in Brussels in April to co-design a new call for co-creation activities within the ORION project. The goal of the interactive workshop was to generate ideas on what the new funding call would look like, what types of projects to fund and who could participate. The new ORION co-creation call will be launched in June.

If you had not heard of Open Science and wondered what it was, or wished there was an Open Science topic you knew more about, then the ORION Open Science Cafe on 4 November during Berlin Science Week was the perfect event.

The ORION partner and non-profit Czech organisation JCMM (South Moravian Centre for International Mobility), was established in 2005 to support and stimulate an influx of students into the region and counteract the brain drain of scientific talent occurring at that time. Since its foundation, the range of JCMM activities has extended to now support talented young people, students, fellows and teachers. Within the ORION regional call for open science projects on local societal challenges, JCMM distributed 10 grants in 2019 to master/Ph.D.students to carry out projects containing strong elements of open science.

We are currently in the process of calling 6000 people in Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. If you one of the chosen ones, pick up the phone and tell us your views on if and how you would like to be involved. The results of this survey will help us design future training, co-creation activities and public dialogues in the Orion Open science project.

Global societal challenges together with growing public interest in science present both opportunities as well challenges for the research world. Open Science is a way to ensure that citizens are involved in research, and that the views of different stakeholders are taken into consideration when shaping science agendas and research projects. How can science communication practitioners, researchers, policy makers and research funding bodies successfully engage with the public, and ensure that their values and interests are taken into account?

At the core of the ORION project is co-creation, which involves collaborating with different groups of people (public, policy, industry) to come up with new ideas to support and increase the impact of scientific research. Over the next two years the Babraham Institute, together with MDC in Germany, VA in Sweden, and CEITEC in the Czech Republic will launch a co-creation exercise on emerging technologies.

“The ORION Open Science project has helped CEITEC both internally to introduce new processes within our institute, and externally to lead the way to Open Science in Central and Eastern Europe” said Jiri Nantl, Director of CEITEC Masaryk University in his welcome speech at the ORION Open Science 2ndAnnual meeting which took place in Brno, Czech Republic on 6-7 May 2019. All ORION partners and associate partners gathered to share and exchange knowledge and experience from project activities such as: stakeholder dialogues on Open Science, Citizen Science projects, public engagement and trainings conducted during the first two years of the project.

The ORION citizen science project Genigma project has been selected as part of a NEWSERA initiative to increase the uptake of citizen science projects among academic researchers across the EU. This coincides with the launch of the Genigma game app which has been in development for two years by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).