ORION, a new European initiative to open up science to society

ORION is a new collaborative European project to explore ways in which research and funding organizations in life sciences and biomedicine can open up the way they fund, organize and do research. The Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, coordinates this project and is one of the nine partners in the project. ORION kicks off in Barcelona this week.

Open science is a core strategy of the European Commission that involves widening participation and collaboration as well as sharing research processes and outcomes to improve research and innovation. All European Union members recognise the benefits of open science, but the transition to “openness” is challenging.

Interesting challenges

The ORION project will help research and funding organizations to understand existing challenges in Open Science and implement institutional, cultural, and behavioral changes in how they carry out and manage research.

“New models of working require novel cooperative approaches that engage lots of different actors, such as researchers, funders, publishers, patient organisations, citizens, students, teachers, or companies,” explains Michela Bertero, coordinator of the ORION project and responsible for International and Scientific Affairs at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.

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ORION is a four-year project with a 3.2 million Euros budget funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme. Partners in the consortium (see list below) represent a mixture of expertise in fundamental research in life sciences and biomedicine, social sciences, funding, science communication, public engagement, and civil society. The project will be working closely with EU-LIFE, an alliance of top life science research institutes in 13 European countries.