ORION Open Science

ORION Open Science was an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project exploring ways in which research and funding organisations in life sciences and biomedicine can open up the way they fund, organise and do research. VA (Public & Science) was one of the nine partners in the project that ran from May 2017 to September 2021.

The EU ORION Open Science project involved a wide range of benchmarking, co-creation and training activities designed to test different ways to involve the public and other stakeholders in the research process. The long-term vision was to embed Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles in Research and performing organisations, in their policies, practices and processes.

ORION Resources

On the ORION website you can find a range of tools and resources to support open science and RRI practices, which have been developed and tested during the project. These include:

• ORION Inspiring Stories – containing 12 stories that highlight successes and learnings from activities conducted during the project

Tools for Co-creation and engagement

• Menu of Co-creation Tools – an overview of 31 participatory methods that can be used to involve different stakeholders in the research process.
• Public dialogues – how to guide on how to run a public dialogue as a tool for promoting open science plus detailed reports on the results of public dialogues on genome editing run in four countries (Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany and the UK).
• Innovative examples of citizen science and educational games – such as the ORION Genigma game and ORION Virus Fighter game, SMOVE and Meltic (Ideas MELting pot for TIC and Health Science for Citizens in Small communities).
• An arts residency and exhibition designed to promote discussion around the use of genome editing.

Public attitudes to life sciences research in six European countries – results of an ORION survey investigating the motivations for citizens’ involvement in life sciences research.

Training resources

• ORION Open Science podcast – a series of interviews with interesting guests on a variety of topics related to Open Science, such as data sharing, citizen science, peer review and professional development.
• ORION Open Source MOOC for the life sciences –  free online training course on different aspects of Open Science that allows researchers to gain a certificate in Open Science.
• ORION Case Studies for Training – three case studies for use in short workshops to stimulate discussion about open science principles and practical actions. 
• ORION E-learning platform – four lessons on different aspects of Open Science available in English and Czech
• Open Science Researcher Checklist – for researchers to assess where they can make changes to open science practices in their day-to-day research.

ORION Open Science Factsheets –  15 brief, informative, and easy-to-understand one-page factsheets on Open Science topics: 1. Biohacking and DIYBio Research 2. Career Benefits of Open Science 3. Citizen science. 4. Commercialisation of Research 5. Communicating Animal Research 6. Crowd Science 7. Research Data Management 8. Open Access 9. Open Research Data 10. Open Source and Software 1 Pre-Registration 12. Predatory Journals 13. Preprints 14. Public Engagement 15. Reproducibility.

Funding and embedding Open Science

• Institutional Open Science Action plans – developed by ORION partners.
• ORION final conference on 27-28 September 2021 – where ways to incorporate open science in guidelines and strategies at institutional, national and EU level, were discussed together with representatives of national and international organisation.
• Awards and funding models – including the RRI Health Awards (and How to guide) and regional calls for young researchers and collaborations.

VA’s role

VA has been involved in many aspects of the project, including running co-creation experiments, such as the public dialogue held in Sweden, and undertaking a survey to investigate public attitudes to life science research involving 6,000 people from six countries. VA led the Communications & Dissemination work for the project plus organised a range of international workshops and events, including the ORION final conference.

Project consortium:

• Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain (Project co-ordinator)
• ANT Foundation, Italy
• Babraham Institute, UK
• The Central European Institute of Technology, Czech Republic
• CRECIM, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spain
• Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Germany
• South Moravian Centre for International Mobility, Czech Republic
• VA (Public & Science), Sweden

ORION is also on Twitter: @orion_opensci, on Facebook and you can read more about the project on the ORION website.

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