Open and Transparent Science Powered By Blockchain — Orvium

6 min readMay 30, 2018

The STM publishing industry is dominated by a select few publishers, with the top five publishers accounting for an estimated 50% to 70% of all publications. Because of this, they can enact exploitative policies toward researchers, such as NDAs, on the cost of publishing contracts, which are entirely against transparency, and make researchers sign over the copyrights to them.

All of these practices create an inefficient publishing model with a myriad of problems such as:

· High Publication Costs: As much as $3,000 to $5,000 per publication.

· Lack of Transparency: Both with regards to costs, as well as to a limited extent within the peer review process due to misaligned incentives. Many publishers also disallow authors from linking the study results with the data used.

· Long Publication Times: Delays result in an average publication time of 12 months.

· Copyright Issues: Copyrights and licenses often granted to publishers; in theory in exchange for editing, peer review, publishing, and advertising. However, a lot of these functions are carried out on a voluntary basis by the research community. It’s no wonder that STM publishers enjoy high profit margins.

· Low-Quality Journals: The amount of money in the STM publishing industry has resulted in a proliferation of low-quality journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. Since researchers need to publish for career advancement, the less-than-capable ones may opt for such dubious journals if the respected ones do not accept them. The number of articles in such journals increased by 800% from 2010 to 2014.

The mother of all these inefficiencies in the model is the ‘Triple Pay’ model that results in a disproportionate gain for the publishing oligopoly. Here’s a quick explanation.

1. The government funds the majority of scientific research.

2. Volunteer researchers, paid for by (again) the government or institutes, review the work.

3. The publishers sell the product back to universities and governmental institutions.

Essentially, the whole scientific publishing business model is centralized, inefficient, and is slowing down the rate of scientific progress. That’s why Orvium is looking to disrupt the entire industry to make it more equitable and efficient for all parties (including society as a whole) involved.

Orvium unlocks the full potential of a decentralized, fair, transparent and competitive market free of biases, oligopolies and private interests. Scientific work is available from the moment it is submitted.

Solutions

Orvium establishes a transparent, comprehensive and competitive business model which aligned with its ORV token to ensure a continued evolution of the platform while supporting global research. Orvium’s model and the ORV token introduce a fair cost distribution model to authors and research organizations, ensuring recognition for all participants, enabling journals to become viable and sustainable at a low cost.

User Registration and Identification

Any individual can create an account to access the system. Researchers will use ORCID (a non-proprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors and contributors) as an authentication method. In order to prevent identity impersonation in the blockchain, researches should confirm their wallet ownership.

Manuscript Submission

Authors submit their manuscripts to Orvium, creating a public proof-of-existence and authorship which is stored in the blockchain. Orvium offers full traceability of the life-cycle therefore versioning is supported. At any moment, authors can submit new versions of the manuscript. At the moment of manuscript submission authors can stake a number of ORV tokens to encourage and challenge the community for peer reviews. The number of paid reviews and the number of ORV tokens staked for each review will be determined by the author. Depending on the current market price for reviews and other factors such as the expected quality of the reviews or time required, authors will decide on the quantity of ORV tokens to stake per review.

Peer Review

Researchers acting as peer reviewers will submit their reviews to Orvium. The review proof and content will be attached to the history of the manuscript and will be public and accessible to the whole community. In addition, any other user (scientists, institutions or anonymous actors) can stake ORV tokens to reward additional reviews for a given manuscript.

Copyright and Licensing

User licensing is completely determined by the authors or owner. They determine the rights to print, redistribute, download, translate or re-use, and they can alter these rights at any time.

Orvium ORV Token ICO Details

The ORV tokens will be the main currency used on the platform. They will be a transparent way to pay for the services and to finance science. User will get tokens for submitting manuscripts for review, for reviewing them and for sharing his research data. This means that the ORV tokens is basically how user will be paid for his work on the platform.

The author can choose if the content posted on Orvium will be free for access or if it will require a fee. These fees are generally used to provide the money for the authors that publish on the platform.

· Orvium will have a Token Generation Event soon.

· 60% of the tokens created by the company will be sold on this occasion.

· The price will be $0.10 USD per 1 ORV

· The hard cap will be $20,000,000 USD

· The total supply of ORV tokens is 379 million tokens.

· You can pay using BTC, XBT, ETH, USD, CHF, EUR, SGD, DKK and GBP.

Team

The founders of Orvium are Manuel Martin, Roberto Rabasco and Antonio Romero. The three of them are renowned scientists that work either as software engineers or with big data. Their work has led them to reunite and construct this platform to change the future of science in the world.

The scientific advisors of the company are Alberto Di Meglio (head of the CERN openlab), Tom Soderstrom (CTO of NASA-JPL), Chris Mattmann (associate CTO of NASA-JPL), Miguel Angel Pesquera (professor and head of transport and logistics in Cantabria), Nico Orce (nuclear physicist in the Western Cape University), Jesús Villadangos (professor in the University of Navarre).

Being created mostly by scientists, the company also needed business advisors. They are Bernd Lapp (blockchain advisor), Nicolai Oster (head of Bitcoin Suisse AG), Christopher Tucci (chair of EPFL), Franco Amalfi (director of innovation at the Oracle Public Sector North America), Davide Gallo (manager of Amazon Web Services) and Ruben Garcia (marketing expert).

The main partners of the company are Bitcoin Suisse AG, Attela and AmaZix.

Roadmap

Right now, Orvium’s development is still in the early stages. After their ICO in July, Orvium will focus on expanding the team and creating the platform (a functional prototype is planned to be released prior).

The ‘basic’ version of the platform is targeted to be ready by the end of Q3 2018 with licenses, copyrights, and decentralized journals to be added by Q1 2019. The fully functional platform, complete with big data analytics, is only targeted for a Q4 2019 release date.

Orvium Conclusion

This looks like a company that has great chances of success. While Orvium is certainly not the only company with similar ideas of creating a blockchain space for science, this looks like a very safe bet when you see the people involved in this project. The advisors are pretty renowned, so we can see this company growing in the future.