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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GRECO (Fostering a Next Generation of European Photovoltaic Society through Open Science)

Teaser

Summary

GRECO project faces the specific challenge of putting Open Science into action in a 3 yearsâ€™ research project. GRECO researches on 6 innovative solutions that Photovoltaics (PV) can offer to three different societal challenges: energy, circular economy and agriculture, using the fresh and innovative approaches for Responsible Science that Social Science and Humanities (SSH) researchers have been developing in the last decade. GRECO is a demonstrator for all scientists working on technology and innovation, on how R&D projects can adopt such practices. To this end this Consortium has developed a rationale that is being testing within the project to know the opinion of the final users of Open Science: researchers. GRECO understands Open Science as a twofold approach: on the one hand, we understand that science must be open to the world, enabling participatory process among different stakeholders and citizens as a way to speed-up science and achieve results coming from Open Innovation. On the other hand, we must facilitate the discoverability, reuse and transparency of any research output generated due to the inherent scientific activity without precluding the obligation of researchers to keep confidentiality and ensure due knowledge protection.
Benefits from Open Science are wellknown: better informed society, enable international cooperation, foster cross-cutting disruptive innovations, boost economic growth, etc. Thus, GRECO overall objective can be outlined as to bridge the gap between the theoretical Open Science approach and its practical implementation, by generating a valid, inclusive and understandable rationale model.

Work performed

A. Work towards an inclusive model.
By inclusive, we mean that any research activity must be framed into the responsibility ecosystem defined by the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) fundamentals. So that it is not a desirable scenario to perform any type of openness within a research activity without considering gender, ethics, governance or science education actions. Several actions are running in GRECO as to ensure such global dimension, although the main focus of GRECO is the openness understood as a public engagement activity and open research practices.
Considering the timeline of a technological research project that pursues the generation of six responsible technological solutions, it is easier to understand that GRECO has devoted a major effort on the engagement activities during the first period:

- Citizen Science for coming to an Ageing Model for Photovoltaic Modules and a Repairing Procedure of PV Systems. GRECO launched an open call that was distributed around the world trying to find the oldest PV installations (more than 15 years old). The call engaged 110 installations from 5 European countries in less than 2 months. We are currently deciding what installations have data enough as to be consistent and generate the ageing model, and in parallel we are testing our repairing methodology.

- Open Innovation with Irrigators in order to develop a proper product. GRECO performed an exercise of Open Innovation devoted to gathering insights, engaging around 400 people from civil society; delegates of 20 Governments and representatives of 28 SMEs from the irrigation field.

- Mobilization and Mutual Learning (MML) actions. GRECO has been performing this activity from March 2019 to May 2019. Meetings took place in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom and Brazil with a main objective: How can research and development learn from different actors to improve the integration of photovoltaics in society? Around 100 participating stakeholders were reached.

- Citizen Science Initative. In this period we have ideated a procedure to generate Citizen Science Initiatives for boosting professional research activities mobilizing 61 citizens from 15 countries and more than 60 researchers.

B. Work towards a valid model: looking for the flexibility and adaptation.
On the one hand, GRECO has adopted eight of the seventeen current practices on Open Science: Open Proposal, Open Access, Open Data, Open Peer-Review, Open Notebooks, Open Annotation, and Open Source, including a breath of fresh air by listening to researchers claim and providing them not just with academic definitions but with realistic procedures to meet both fundersâ€™ requirements and researchersâ€™ expectations while being aligned to the Open Science essence. All the expertise we have generated will be made public through a Practical Guide for Researchers, that will contain practical solutions to the frequent questions, doubts, concerns, fears,â€¦ on Open Science generated by researchers from different disciplines that GRECO has contacted during this first stage of the project.

C. Work towards an understandable model: looking for the flexibility and adaptation.
In the context of GRECO, one of the activities consists on approaching researchers from different domains in order to establish a two-way engagement process. On the one hand, teach them on how to carry out a more responsible research and adopt Open Science, which has been done with specific courses (4) and through contributions in international conferences and seminars. On the other hand, generate debate and discussions in different scenarios to gather insights on the rationale model for Open Science we propose, to serve as a basis for the Practical Guide we aim to launch.

Final results

GRECO is working on several technological products that go beyond the state-of-the-art which through the different engagement activities we have carried out expect to be aligned with the current societal needs and customersâ€™ expectations. In this regard, the solutions ageing model and PV in-situ repairing methodology are coming in a stage where the photovoltaic market is blooming, with more than 100 GW of new installations per year, and prospects to go beyond this figure in the short term. And although the 97% of the current 500GW of photovoltaic energy installed is younger than 10 years old, in short our products will be highly demanded by the market. The third product, the PV irrigation system has been simply requested by the final consumer, so targets directly to cover a real expectation and need from our farmers. Regarding the micro-CPV system, we are demonstrating its potential to cover higher energy demands and the open monitoring of the system will favour a real transparency on the performance of this product sold by and European company, which hopefully will lead to a major consumersâ€™ confidence. Research on perovskites is probably far away from the market at the moment, but we are creating the basis for a next generation of solar technology demonstrating how Open Science can foster the international collaboration, i.e. by creating a common database with data from 13.000 papers which we expect to be a worldwide reference. And finally, heat-pumps are a product which of be successful will support the heat demands from citizens from a renewable point of view.
The same sympathy we have looked for the technological products has been also built for the Open Science rationale, engaging hundreds of researchers on a collaborative effort about their fears, concerns and hesitations on Open Science. Our hope is that the Guide we will publish next year is received and accepted by technological researchers widely when they find out practical responses to their critical questions on the adoption of Open Science.