Open Consortium

Blog

We are hiring

2013-09-02

Open Consortium is growing and we are looking for someone to build up our sales team. At Open Consortium, we develop open-source technologies and provide trainings to European consortia, and your job will be to perform online research about European projects, make email and phone campaigns, and maintain our in-house database.

Graphene and the Human Brain: two European science flagship projects

2013-01-28

At the core of science funding of the Eurpean commission is the financial support for collaborative research projects. More than 4000 such projects were started in FP7 over the last seven years. Typically, these projects receive funding up to several million EUR. This is very different for the Graphene and Human Brain flagship projects of the European Commission. Both projects could obtain up to a billion EUR in support, the Commission funds both projects initially with a 54 million EUR startup budget, both projects will then be supported from the Horizon 2020 budget, as well as from other public and industry sources.

Why it is important to sign the petition for securing the EU research budget

2012-10-25

On October 23rd, the Initiative for Science in Europe started an online petition for securing the EU research budget. Only two days later over 58 000 people have signed the call. This is an unprecedented response of scientists from all over Europe. Many are aware of what is at stake. Currently, the European Parliament debates the budget for the next framework program, determining funding lines from 2014 until 2020. 80 bn Euro are necessary to ensure continuous success of EU-science funding. The final decision will be made towards the end of November.

Open Access policies of the European Commission

2012-10-04

One main topic stream of the Open Knowledge festival in Helsinki was on Open Research and Education. Sessions of particular interest for us touched on open research data and in particular on Open Access publishing. Carl-Christian Buhr of the European Commission gave a comprehensive summary of the EC policies on this topic - with surprising perspectives.

Presenting at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki

2012-09-21

Tobias Maier and myself introduced Open Consortium yesterday at Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, a week of participatory sessions, hackatons and keynote lectures on the topic of open data.

Building our first consortium website

2012-09-15

Your consortium website is probably the most important communication tool you have. We recently launched our first Open Consortium website built on our technology package, for a European research network training new researchers in male reproductive biology and andrology.

Commitment to communication

2012-09-06

The European Commission has a communication problem. At least that’s what we claimed in our previous blog post and we think we do have a point: every year billions of Euros are invested in research and innovation and hardly anyone outside the academic world knows about it.

Welcome to Open Consortium

2012-07-31

Welcome to Open Consortium. A little known fact to start of with: the European Commission currently funds basic biomedical research with approximately seven billion EUR per year. How is this money being spent? And how come nobody outside the scientific community knows about this?