Open and Transparent Science Powered by Blockchain - Orvium

The importance of Science in our daily life cannot be overemphasized. Science influences most facets of our everyday life ranging from the food we eat, clothes we wear, the exotic cars we drive to the books we read. No wonder it's often said that 'Science is God's Greatest Gift to Humanity'.

One of the most interesting and remarkable thing about the achievements of science is the ability for researchers to be inspired to generate new ideas and ameliorate the results obtained from existing research works made by other scholars. However, how these results are disseminated is really important in the science life cycle, and it has been discovered that knowledge dissemination has been greatly compromised in the current scientific publishing industry.

This can be attributed to the fact that the current publishing industry runs a centralized model where only a certain percentage of publishers benefit and amass 50-70% of the all the publications. What currently exists is a system called triple pay system, where governments fund most of the research, and upon completion of the research, scientists voluntarily expend their energies to review the results, and then publishers sell these same products back to government-funded institutions and university libraries, who, ideally actually produced the product in the first place.

In 2015 alone, the global STM publishing market was approximated to be $25 billion. According to statistics, the number of journals published yearly grows by 3.5%. However, despite the growth and evolution of the publication industry, the current business models which have defects is still being maintained and used. The current model has left many scholars feeling aggrieved because they do not benefit from their works in the industry. Also, the cost of journals keeps increasing yearly, reviewers are often not being rewarded and the number of biased publications keeps increasing. These and many more are the current challenges with the current publishing industry.

It is therefore truly evident that the current publishing industry is need of a total overhaul, and there is a burning need for a platform that will not only address the current issues but also seek out to provide a transparent, open and secure platform for scholars worldwide. However, this can be achieved with the utilization of blockchain technology due to its transparent, open and secure feature which will help in combatting the current mistrust in the scientific process. Blockchain can help prevent meddling and enhance reproducibility. Due to its immutable nature, it makes use of a decentralized system of online records to quash the need for a centralized system.

In the bid to provide this platform, Orvium went all out making research to understand the problems with the current business model, why they exist, and how to address it. From findings, the following issues were observed to be the major issues:

• Dissemination of scientific results are often being compromised
• Reviewers are often not commended and rewarded
• exorbitant publication costs
• copyrights are held by publishers instead of authors
• long, obscure and biased publication
• the burgeoning of low-quality articles.

Orvium aims to leverage on blockchain technology to provide a platform that will not only get rid of the current inefficiencies but also ameliorate the standard and efficacy of scientific publishing. Orvium which happens to be the first open source and decentralized framework for managing scholarly publications' lifecycle, aims to disrupt the current business model with the use of four cutting-edge technologies. These core technologies will be the driving force of the Orvium platform and will help in providing an open source and decentralized skeleton, useful to manage the entire cycle of scholarly publications.

CORE TECHNOLOGIES

• Blockchain and Decentralized storage - This will enable an open, trackable, and reliable record of the publication process.
• Cloud computing - This is utilized to make the platform pliable, easily accessible globally, and highly scalable.
• Big data analytics and machine learning - will allow precocious analyses on the platform so as to intensify lifecycle automation, aid peer review accuracy, identify rising trends and topics, and categorize papers based on their content.

Orvium is taking a different approach to addressing the current issues in the publishing industry by proposing a model that will focus on the below:

• Intensify science to human practice by orienting publication model with research aims, and also charging the scientific community with the capacity to completely manage all dissemination facets.
• Offer returns benefits to science by making sure authors and research institutions maintain total possession of copyrights and licenses. The platform will help scientist and funding institutions get benefits which rightfully belongs to them.
• Make science general, open, transparent and accessible to everyone.
• Duly appreciate works of researchers' and its impact on the society by using a set of metrics obtained from public blockchain records to ascertain the quality and significance of a manuscript. This will eliminate the current model which uses the journal where the manuscript was published as a basis to assess the quality of the research.
• Make the best use of scientific validation and collaboration by ensuring that the community can easily access research results, data, codes and other relevant information used during the pre and post publishing stages.
• Actively involve the community in the scientific process and its evolution, thereby making science open.

Despite the huge market opportunity and size, the current scientific publishing market is highly concentrated and dominated by a few publishers, with the top five publishers accounting for about 50 - 70% of all publications. This has impeded the influx of new researchers, thereby creating a market entry barrier. In addition to this, several other contributing factors which have created market entry barriers are social and scientific factors (E.g. researchers are scared of their ideas being plagiarized), technological (absence of integrated data infrastructure), cost and policies factors.

To address the current market entry barriers, Orvium is proposing a strategy that will terminate publication cost obstacles, enhance knowledge dissemination, support research, develop open source and improve R&D collaboration frameworks. For example, users are able to get a significant reduction in the cost of publication if they assist to ameliorate the quality of the science or maybe validate the science through peer review. Such users would be rewarded with Orvium tokens. Also, a certain portion of the Orvium budget will be apportioned to create, promote and leverage Orvium's publication model.

In using the Orvium platform, scholars will have access to low and affordable fees for transactions. This will help to reduce the current bottle-necks associated with high publication costs in the current publishing industry.
Scholars who intend to use the Orvium platform stand to benefit from zero-delay publication, as manuscripts submitted are made available online to users worldwide within minutes. Also, every manuscript published via the Orvium platform will have a time-stamped proof of existence, authorship and ownership, which guarantees security and eliminates every form of plagiarism.

TOKEN
The Orvium token (ORV) will be issued in the form of an ERC-20. It will function as a multi-utility token which will be used to fuel the Orvium platform. Activities such as manuscript submission, peer review, copyright licenses payments, research data sharing will induce exchange of the Orvium token between authors, journal owners, institutions, readers etc.

Total Supply: 379,000,000 ORV
Token symbol: ORV
Hard cap: 20,000,000 USD
Current Price: 1 ORV= 0.1 USD
Country: Estonia

TEAM
The team responsible for this revolutionary disruption of the publishing industry has a wealth of experience in data management, Big data, machine learning, research and development, blockchain technology, computer and software engineering. The advisors consist of great scientists with different backgrounds.

Kindly visit https://orvium.io/ for more information.
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