The IREA CNR institute, in a project leaded by Alba L’Astorina, will soon publish a book about Responsible Research and Innovation. We are glad to announce that the EcoNÀOS project will be part of this book as an RRI experience.

But what does it mean exactly Responsible Reseach and Innovation? RRI guidelines make part of the Horizon 2020 European Commission program. It is aimed to accomplish a research which can bring innovation to the society, but it also directly involves society.

The research is meant to be pursued by fixing six fundamental principles:

  1. Public Engagement: the whole Society must be involved into the reseach. For “society” we intend citizens, researchers, policy makers and stakeholders. Each one of them must take place into the research/innovation process, integrating their point of view in order to model research on real needs;
  2. Gender Equality: the gender fact plays a key role in RRI. Human resources sections must take in consideration the under representation of female gender in research in order to fill this gap and promote equality at best;
  3. Science Education: RRI promotes the growth of students in science and technology education. There’s always need for fresh scientific ideas and future researchers to pursue them;
  4. Ethics: Ethics pillar is aimed to do research in the “right way”. This means the practical application of FAIR principles in the research developement in order to ensure better quality results;
  5. Open Access: results must be shared in order to achieve a real scientific “progress” and this must be done ASAP, by sharing not only final results, but for example data (elaborated and raw);
  6. Governance: the policy makers are in charge to take decision and state behaviors in order to apply all the previous principles to scientific research.

This approach represents science for and with citizens. Moreover, this could lead at least to two important results:

  • a more ethic research (everything is at under sunlight), consequently each decision taken (governance) on the basis of this research could be more agreed an shared from citizens
  • grow a more science-aware society.

In this context, our project fits at least the “open access” principle; it also enlarges the landscape to Open Science by adding the code (Open Source) and the process in general in order to achieve a FAIR behavior as stated by the European programme Horizon 2020.

Our short article will be entitled “work in progress” since, after 7 months of work we start making a balance of the progress made and themes to insist on. Strenght point of the approach and obstacles along the way.

The book will be published by CNR editions, each contribution will be citeable by the assignment of a DOI and the entire book will be available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY).