ORVIUM — Open and Transparent Science Powered by Blockchain

cratortouch (31)in #blockchain • 6 years ago

download (20).jpeg

Orvium is the first open source and decentralized framework for managing scholarly publications’ life cycles and the associated data. Orvium introduces a disruptive business model into the research publication market through a unique combination of four core technologies:

• blockchain and smart contracts;
• decentralized storage
• cloud computing;
• big data analytics and machine learning.

Using blockchain technology and a decentralized storage approach will allow a public, fully traceable, and trustworthy record of the publication process at a minimal cost. Meanwhile, cloud computing technologies will provide flexibility, global availability and scalability to the platform and services. Finally, big data analytics and machine learning will enable advanced analyses to enhance life cycle automatization, facilitate peer review accuracy (e.g., identify plagiarism), classify papers based on their content and identify emerging trends and topics, among other goals.

Our objective at Orvium is to help the scientific community share its publications, eliminate existing inefficiencies and biases of the publication market and improve the quality and effectiveness of the publication life cycle. Orvium’s model focuses on the following areas:

Help to enhance science to human heritage

“Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it” - A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Science is not just a beautiful gift to humanity but also one of the most important components of human heritage. As such, science and associated research activities need to be protected and preserved in their purest state while open access to the scientific knowledge needs to be ensured. Efforts to chain the business sales model with consortia licensing and attempts to change the business model by introducing open access journals and archives have had positive impacts, but they have not solved the main problems.

In this sense, Orvium proposes an open and transparent framework that will eradicate existing access barriers to scientific knowledge by aligning the publication model with research objectives. Orvium will empower the scientific community to fully own and control all aspects of dissemination.

Offer a business model that returns benefits to science

In contrast to any other publishing industry, scientific publishers have successfully foisted the cost and effort of publication onto the community that they serve.
Governments fund most of the research and once research results are ready for publication publishers acquire them for free. The publishers do pay editors who assess the quality of the writing and improve it as needed, but the bulk of the editorial burden — checking the scientific validity, evaluating the experiments and judging the scientific worth of the research — is done through the process of peer review . That burden is borne by working scientists on a volunteer basis; their salaries are normally paid by the government and research institutes. Finally, the publishers sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists, who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place. This outrageous economic model, often called a triple-pay system, has been criticized by numerous scientists and research institutions as a perverse and needless business as well as a public scandal.

Orvium intends to stop this drain of resources by offering a fair model which brings costs to a minimum and ensures authors and research institutions retain full ownership of copyrights and licenses. In addition, Orvium provides mechanisms to cycle back the benefits generated by the scientific community to scientists and funding institutions.

Make science more transparent, universal and open access than ever before

All Orvium source code will be published under an open source license, but the commitment to openness and transparency extends much further. Every single action, task, and transaction in the system (e.g., submissions of manuscripts, revisions, publications, peer reviews, citations checks, author acceptances) will be accessible to anyone. This is supported using blockchain and smart contract technologies at the core of the system.

Truly recognize researchers’ work and its impact

Currently, the perceived quality of an article, and therefore the researcher’s work, is largely determined by the journal in which the manuscript is published. In essence, the journal impact factor is used as a proxy for the quality of the research.
Unfortunately, this approach lacks statistical robustness, alters editor and researcher choices and incentivizes the addition of extraneous citations.

Orvium proposes an evolution to the model to evaluate scientific results. At the core of this model is a set of metrics directly derived from public blockchain records.
These metrics determine the quality and importance of a given manuscript. In this sense, journals no longer exist as a core entity. Instead, manuscripts take the central role. Orvium calculates the impact of a given manuscript by a fair and transparent use of factors that are all publicly available in the blockchain: peer reviews accepted, the importance of the reviewers within the field, quality of references and citations used, author previous work, and so forth.

Maximize scientific validation and collaboration

At Orvium, we believe that independent peer reviews are an excellent manner to validate scientific results. However, we are aware that it has biases and problems.
Orvium introduces an innovative integration between blockchain and big data analytics technologies which will leverage an unprecedented framework to detect and avoid most of those biases and problems.

Orvium aims to go much further than that. Sharing the research data, code, etc., that has led to the results and conclusion published in a manuscript will clearly improve the scientific validation and potential scientific collaboration.

Our vision is to allow the entire community to have access, not only to the results of the study, but also to the study itself.

Incorporate society in the scientific process and its evolution

With Orvium, society as a whole can learn from the way science works and also participate in it. Among its goals, Orvium aims to open science to society and facilitate a completely new way to incorporate the public into the scientific process and its evolution. Orvium will support that using a disruptive business model focused on scientists and enhancing the participation and involvement of society.

THE ORVIUM TOKEN

download (23).jpeg