RRI

Join us to discuss Open Science, RRI and genomic medicine during ESOF 2020 - EuroScience Open Forum on 3 and 4September. The theme for ESOF 2020 is: “Freedom for science, science for freedom". Due to Covid-19, this year's ESOF is also open for online participation.

The ORION research funding partner in Spain, the Carlos III Health Institute (Instituto de Salud Carlos III), launched last January an award for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Health Research. The award - #RRIhealthawards, seeks to recognise, support, promote and disseminate the work of ISCIII funded Health Research Institutes to incorporate the principles of RRI in their activities and projects. The call was open to Spanish Health Research Institutes that have developed significant institutional RRI activities during 2019.

“What an exciting potential future for science!” commented one of the participants in the ORION MOOC for Open Science in Life Sciences, when discussing what they had learnt from the course. The ORION MOOC course ran for six weeks from October-November 2019 and was open for anyone interested in Open Science. A new MOOC will run again in early 2020.

How can you establish cultural change? How do you implement and embed Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in your organisation? These are the questions that the ORION project aims to answer. From the start of the project in 2017, ORION has been exploring how to establish an open dialogue with society on relevant research topics, such as genome editing, and has been developing new ways and collaborations between researchers and the general public. Co-creation is at heart of the ORION project.

Open Science is about making research more accessible to society. But how do we get there and what obstacles are in the way? These were the questions raised at a seminar arranged by the ORION partner VA (Public & Science) at the Almedalen Week in Sweden on 2 July.

On 9 March the final ORION Open Science roundtable was organised by the ORION partner JCMM in Brno, Czech Republic. This was the final leg in the JCMM co-creation scheme which was launched in June 2018 debating the Open Science framework with representatives from academia, local government, business, NGOs, students and the general public.

The Czech partner JCMM held a workshop on Open Science for university students on 29th November. The aim of the workshop was to acquaint interested students with the ORION project, the principles for Open Science and the new call for Open Science projects which was recently launched by JCMM. The event was hosted by the Brno Urban Centre and attended by potential applicants from almost all eligible Brno universities.

How do you trigger institutional, cultural and behavioural changes in research organizations to foster open science and RRI? The ORION project is exploring these questions. In the TEAM ZBW Mediatalk interview, Dr. Michela Bertero and Dr. Luiza Bengtsson give some details on the projects goals, actions and learnings on fostering open science and responsible research and innovation (RRI).

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, dialogue between science and society is more important than ever. This year’s EuroScience Open Forum, a hybrid of in-person and online events held 2-6 September, provided a key international platform to discuss and share experiences on issues such as communicating scientific uncertainty and maintaining public trust in science. The ORION Open Science partners contributed to three online sessions during the week discussing Open Science, RRI and genomic medicine. Did you miss the event? Some sessions are now available on YouTube.

The ORION project has launched a funding call for novel co-creation initiatives to open up research in life sciences and biomedicine. This call will provide funding of up to 100,000€ for a project that brings together a variety of different participants from across a range of sectors to co-create a new project or product based around life sciences research.