open science

Again and again, crises have led to a cultural change. Often an acute threat has turned into sustainable progress. Despite all the necessary provisional nature of current observations on the corona crisis, such a development seems to be emerging, especially in science and research. During the last months, the ways in which we conduct research, innovation and how we communicate science have changed so profoundly that it may well change the world forever. The ORION partner Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC), has asked its scientists about their views on open science practices and possible changes due to the corona crisis.

The answer to this question is by incorporating different views in problem solving processes. This is precisely what we sought to explore during the ORION workshop on genome editing research at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF 2018) in July. With over 4,000 delegates, ESOF is the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe and was the perfect place for this experiment, offering a unique opportunity for interaction and debate with scientists, innovators, policy makers, business people and citizens.

The questionnaire used in the online quantitative ORION Open Science self-assessment study is now available and free to use to support other research funding and performing organisations to carry out self-assessment activities. The study which examined the views and practices of Open Science in the ORION partner institutions was developed and carried out by the Centre for Research in Science and Mathematics Education (CRECIM).

The first co-creation event of the Citizen Science project Genigma kick-started at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona in January where close to 40 participants engaged with their most creative ideas to develop an app to discover the genomic alterations in cancer cells. Genigma is one of the two Citizen Science projects that has received funding from the ORION project.

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.

Long-lived institutional change has always been one of the goals of ORION. It’s relatively easy to find and convince like-minded people that responsible research and innovation (RRI) is important. However, in order to bring about real change, it’s important to engage with people all the way through an institution. Only then can true institutional change become a reality.

Genigma is a citizen science project funded by ORION and led by Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico at Centre for Genomic Regulation (CNAG-CRG). The goal of this 2-years project was to co-create with citizens a game for smartphones to accelerate cancer research. Citizens have collaborated on the Genigma project in...

In 2018, as a part of the ORION Open Science project, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, MDC, held pilot training workshops on Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation. The pilots were to form the basis of an ambitious schedule of workshops run during the ORION project as well as inform the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Open Science for the Life Sciences, that remains available after the end of ORION.

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.

To help open science up to a wider audience, ORION organised a number of public dialogues in the UK, Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic during 2019-2020. One purpose of the dialogues was to explore public attitudes to genome editing technology, which has revolutionized scientific research in the past decade and has the potential for broad societal impact. The dialogues also aimed to understand how to engage the public on disruptive technologies and how public engagement strategies could vary between countries. Information about the potential use of the technology has led to a wide variety of different opinions and reactions from the public, which are not always based on scientific fact. The empirical evidence gathered during the dialogues will provide the basis of future communications strategies within the ORION institutions.