High-Level Roundtable and Interactive Workshop

Opening Research Infrastructures - How citizens can play an active role in the advance of ground-breaking research?

Europe is home of major world class research infrastructures which are crucial enablers of research and technological innovation and drivers of multidisciplinary and data-intensive science. Such research infrastructures can also play a key role in eliminating anti-intellectual beliefs in society and providing citizens with the intellectual ammunition needed to become critical consumers of scientific knowledge.

This can be done by creating a well-functioning ecosystem that allows new forms of co-creation between professional researchers and citizen scientists by empowering the latter not only with access to research outputs but also to take part in the process of scientific discovery producing high-quality data and adding to the scientific knowledge.

In that regard, it is of utmost important to rethink policies to make research infrastructures a key player in citizen science through a consistent involvement of citizens making a genuine and valued contribution to managing the data avalanche.
 

Speakers

• Claudia Fabo Cartas from ECSA, will open the discussion with an overview of policy objectives with regards to citizen science across Europe; (SLIDES)
• Emmanuel Tsesmelis from CERN, will provide an overview of the most important research infrastructures in Europe for particle physics; (SLIDES)
• Marina Manzoni from the European Commission, will present the European Union’s perspective; (SLIDES)
• In a highly interactive setting, Stavros Katsanevas, President of the council of the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) and project coordinator of REINFORCE, will present REINFORCE’s approach to citizen science, in which citizens are provided with open data produced by the project demonstrators and contribute in performing inquiries on scientific research and real-world applications; (SLIDES)
• And Francesco Mureddu, director at the Lisbon Council, will introduce the Policy roadmap on research infrastructures for citizen science in Europe. (SLIDES)

Alongside an eclectic audience of policymakers, education-policy-experts, think tankers and academics, REINFORCE will kick-off the co-creation process of a Policy roadmap on research infrastructures for citizen science in Europe. Specifically, the roundtable will include a 30-minute co-creation session, where all participants will be asked to actively share their views on the policy challenges and gaps they are facing on national and local level.