ORVIUM; THE PERFECT SOLUTION TO SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING

UNDERSTANDING THE COLD WAR BETWEEN SCIENTISTS AND THE SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS; CAN ORVIUM BE THE SOLUTION?

Can you look around to catch a glimpse of that stuff you simply can’t do without? The houses, cars, food, smartphone or what; just name it.

Ferrari

That stuff will always be linked as a product from the advancement of science. So when the community of research scientists coughs, it will definitely affect our collective living.
How about the publishing industry? They disseminate those electronic and printed pieces of information to the general public; enabling us to get well informed and stay relevant in our chosen fields of endeavor.
So when we say there’s a rage between these two important sectors; it calls for a concern that obviously needs to be resolved. Let’s start with understanding the manner of war; what it entails and see the possible ways to resolve them.

UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLE

With the above listed actors at rage; it becomes a pretty easy guess that the business model associated with the scientific publishing to be the cause.

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The relationship has it that scientists are relatively very busy set of people in their laboratories, conducting researches and doesn’t have that time to start attending to the dissemination of the information they do generate. To this effect, some publishers dedicated to the field of science came up and filled the void; making huge profits as a result without due compensation to the base source. This has irked the community of research scientists who frowns at the business model that took so much from them without recourse to their plight.

THE CURRENT BUSINESS MODEL

According to the current business model; government funds most of the research projects with the scientific publishers laying hold and publishing the results of such researches freely; paying editors to access the quality of the writing, and have the bulk of the work falling back on volunteer scientists/reviewers, who checks the scientific validity, evaluates the experiments and judge the scientific worth of the research through Peer Reviews. While these editors were well compensated, the scientific reviewers who remain anonymous are left with neither recognition nor financial compensation for their contribution.
At the end of the tedious process, the work gets published and ends up being sold back to the government-funded institutions and libraries; to be read by the scientists who in true essence; created the product in the first place. This business model has proven so lucrative for the publishing companies at the expense of the scientists, who have turned against the Tripple pay system of a business model that exploit the community and government without any form of compensation. The criticisms was one of the factors that lead to the Cost of Knowledge campaign that generated the endorsement of over 15,000 researchers; calling for the boycott of Elsevier’s journals. There is no doubt that the impact of the scientific publishing industry in the dissemination of science based knowledge during the print era was well appreciated; but there necessity in today’s digital era remains a question to answer according to Vincent Lariviere; a study leader at the University of Montreal; Canada.

CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH TODAY’S BUSINESS MODEL

Today’s business model is in profit owing to the evolution of the necessary parameters.

Challenges

In all of upgrade; the business model has been left behind, resulting in the series of criticisms that has recently greeted the industry.
Below are the areas of challenge that has come under serious critique as a result:

• Lack of transparency owing to the absence of a standardized procedure binding authors and reviewers. This has
  resulted in a system that has been marred by severe irregularities; resulting in the growing lack of confidence in the
  system.
• Increased time lag between submission and publication of research data; giving rise to intellectual theft and behind
  the scene plagiarism
• High cost of publication
• High cost of access to scientific results
• Limited availability of research data backed with the research process hence; inhibiting scientific validation and
  collaboration.
• Poor community reviews owing to poor structuring, absence of compensation packages and recognition to the
  reviewing scientists
• Coveting of researcher’s copyrights and licenses
• Low quality journals and predatory practices like plagiarism etc.

These challenges have prompted the urgent need for solutions resulting in the rise of independent journals which wasn’t able to whether the challenge. This leaves a close examination of an ongoing project by ORVIUM as a possible solution.

CAN ORVIUM BE THE SOLUTION?

Orvium has monitored the above challenges for quite some time now; and has seen the resolution and the input of more features as a recipe to calming the ongoing rage.

Thinking

To that effect, they have really done well in the ongoing project and seeks the cooperation of the outside world in establishing a platform with better business model. How they hope to achieve this is contained in the Orvium approach.

THE ORVIUM APPROACH

Orvium; been the first open source and decentralized platform for managing peer review scholarly publication lifecycle and the associated data, has embraced the blockchain and smart contract technology as the foundation to which her work will be based. This is owed to the fact that blockchain technology enables the building of an open, decentralized, secured and collaborative environment; where people can push in records and have the members of the ecosystem control how the records are worked on and updated without the widespread fear of corrupting or hacking. The authors, manuscripts, reviewers, reviews, etc. will be modeled and stored within the blockchain, noting every submission, modification and reviews for the traceability of the lifecycle of papers submitted.

Other technological prowess embraced by Orvium in the turning the tide around includes:

• Decentralized storage system for an effective, efficient, online and offline storage solution,
• Cloud computing for flexible, scalable and global access to system resources and services with minimal
  management
• Big data analytics for effective management and facilitation of heterogeneous data such as transactions on existing
  research literatures and connections between researchers and science based publications, on blockchain
• Machine learning for the unlocking of valuable insights such as research/Researcher impact factors, reviewer’s
  relevance, peer review rings, download counts etc.
• Custom web Interface to enable the project oriented objectives which starts with user authentication and identity
  validation, provision of collaborative environments to write and prepare manuscripts; read and annotate them;
  follow researchers and topics, while uniquely providing links to their research, etc. The interphase will also be
  compatible to browser wallets to enable a tokenized administration of transactions on blockchain.
• Public API tools and other tools aimed at encouraging collaboration

The above approaches obviously have what it takes to eliminate the present challenges; replacing them with more welcomed alternatives. This has prompted series of solutions expected to characterize the Orvium project when brought to fruition:

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Below are the solutions around which the Orvium platform is being built.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

• Instant publication of manuscripts with proof of existence
• Friendly publication and access costs
• Flexible update of manuscripts
• Copyrights and licensing rights to a research work remains with the author and are granted others at his own
  volition.
• Publishes an integration of research data alongside the research processes
• Transparent peer reviews with public recognition and rewards for the reviewers
• Collaborative peer review platform aimed at improving the quality of reviews. This implies more than one author
  jointly reviewing a paper and be held accountable for doing so
• Collaborative platform for multi authorship of publications aimed at encouraging collaborations in research and
  quality productions
• Similar framework to the DAO project, aimed at creating decentralized journals at a lower cost
• Freedom of subscription to journals
• Decentralized approach towards curbing predatory practices like plagiarism, idea ownership and registration using
  the blockchain technology.
• Creation of a secured platform for authors to share unpublished data with select scientists of their choice. This
  feature hopefully; will speed up quality researches
• Encouraging competitive and open market model via voluntary subscription
• Utilize ORCID integration into the system and the accountability properties of the blockchain unique identification
  system to uniquely authenticate and identify authors and their works. This will help resolve issues bothering on
  impersonations, identical names, change of names in situations like marriage, etc.

With a deep understanding on the issues raised above and the solutions proffered by the Orvium project, it can be clearly seen that the existing war is nearing its end. The only pending challenge here lies with funding and penetrating the market. Management is already thrashing the funding aspect of it at the ICO while the other market barriers will be resolved by;

MARKET ENTRY ADVANTAGES

• Drastic reduction of publication costs to encourage participation
• Open source software
• Improved science dissemination
• Funding of science based researches with a clear impact on the society
• Creating and funding frameworks that will encourage Research and developmentally based collaboration.

In the whole developments stated herein; it becomes obvious that;

• There exists an unrest between the research scientists and the publishers
• This unrest has been unmasked and a possible solution at hand going by the Orvium’s project.
• The market entry strategy has been mapped out

In that case, we look forward to a happy community of scientists and improved global society backed by positive scientific impacts.

Look out for my next article that bothers on the economic viability of the scientific publishing industry; the Orvium project investment appeal, roadmap, token economy, the team behind the project and why the Orvium project will be a hit for every willing investor.

Thank you!

Note: contact references for more details:

REFERENCES:

Website: https://orvium.io/
Whitepaper: https://orvium.docsend.com/view/nvr6ywj
Telegram: https://t.me/orvium
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orvium.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/orvium
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Orvium/
Medium: https://medium.com/@orvium
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3565166
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orvium
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orvium/