Efficient Payments in Academia, Through Blockchain!

hatu (76)in #ethereum • 6 years ago (edited)

Advancements in academia fuel economic development.

Universities fuel the research and innovative thinking that carry our abilities forward. Critical technologies and medicines, some that later evolved into the core of some of the largest companies in the world, have their roots in the research done at universities.

One of the most important factors in growing the aggregate human knowledge is collaboration. Naturally, the more minds at work, the merrier. This is evidenced by the fact that advancements in technology and medicine have propelled forward since the establishment of the internet.

The internet has provided us with the invaluable ability to provide information accessibility at an immeasurable scale. This has greatly benefitted the academic community as information transfers that used to take days with physical transfers are now possible within an instant. Cross-border collaboration and access to information is a reality. However, the internet does have some limitations.

The internet provides a valuable means to transfer information but it cannot provide an internal medium for value transfer. A lot of academic data is proprietary and has either been purchased by companies or research institutions that offer only paid access to the data in their possession. There is nothing wrong with this as the payments for valuable data allow the accumulation of funds to continue research. The problem is that the payment means are not internal to the internet and are handled by payment networks.

Payment networks incorporate many middlemen and so are naturally inefficient. High transaction fees and slow delivery of funds are a common problem with the existing state of payments. Blockchain technology provides the remedy to this as it can act as a layer atop the internet that twines information and value transfer into a single interaction, and a new blockchain project, Orvium, leverages this ability of blockchain technology to bring payment efficiency to academia.

Efficient Payments for Proprietary Data

Orvium provides an efficient ecosystem for academic journals and research data. The core functionality of the project is to eliminate the middlemen involves in academia, ensuring the growth of human knowledge can be accelerated.

Orvium makes it possible for new journals to reach reviewers without the need of middlemen; journal reviewing and the subsequent publishings become part of a decentralized cycle. Journals are recorded on the blockchain; existing works can be easily onboarded within the Orvium ecosystem. Smart contracts provide the ability to turn the data in a journal into an autonomous entity that can accept qualified payments in the form of tokens. Consequently, Orvium provides a means for researchers to trace and gain access to valuable data more efficiently than ever before, and it then allows for an easy, instantaneous payment for access to data that sits within a paywall.

As Orvium places the transactions for proprietary data on the blockchain, it allows the usage of smart contracts for automated processing of transactions. The removal of middlemen makes the transactions easy and the blockchain facilitates immediate delivery of funds.

With these value-additives, Orvium makes it possible for researchers to access valuable, paywalled data more economically and at a faster than ever pace. The accelerated access to data can ensure researchers are able to advance their work efficiently, thereby providing the potential means to accelerate the aggregate growth of our knowledge.