UPDATED 08:58 EDT / NOVEMBER 07 2018

BLOCKCHAIN

Scientific collaboration blockchain Orvium brings health academic publisher on board

Decentralized scientific publishing and collaboration platform Orvium OÜ announced a partnership today with leading health-science publisher Partners in Digital Health, the company behind peer-reviewed journals Blockchain in Healthcare Today and Telehealth and Medicine Today.

The partnership between Orvium and Partners in Digital Health will make the Telehealth and Medicine Today journal the first journal to run on the decentralized platform.

“Partnering with Orvium is an equally marvelous opportunity where academia and scientific research can experience a transparent and universal sharing of knowledge, unveiling what would otherwise remain dark,” said Tory Cenaj, founder and publisher at Partners in Digital Health. “Ideally, this will lead to a speedier time to market, where both business and patient benefit.“

Orvium, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, developed its platform to use distributed ledger blockchain technology to provide infrastructure for incentivized peer review of scientific journals. All transactions — submissions of manuscripts, revisions, publications, peer reviews, patronage results and the like — would be recorded in a tamper-proof historical record that could be referenced to understand how a scientific article came to the state it’s in today.

The blockchain also provides a method for decentralized storage of publications when combined with multiple-copy cloud storage. That creates a universally accessible and trustworthy authority of the entire publication process from peer review draft to final release.

“This represents another significant milestone for our platform as we move into this next phase of development,” said Manuel Martin, co-founder and chief executive of Orvium. ”Having a major journal like ‘Telehealth and Medicine Today’ as the first to go through our decentralized platform is a strong vote of confidence from a major publisher, and underlines the credentials of our platform.”

As the publishers of Telehealth and Medicine Today, Partners in Digital Health seeks to assist with leading research that is transforming the health industry. The TMT journal is an open access online, peer-reviewed publication.

The journal focuses on advances in program implementation, outcomes, process improvement, financial impact and clinical research applications. The objective is to provide rapid research for articles and commentary related to advances in patient-centered care.

Partners in Digital Health expects to use the Orvium blockchain-based platform to reduce costs related to publishing, provide more efficient and trustworthy distribution for articles and peer review.

Scientific publishing is a massive globe-spanning industry that connects researchers, publishers and universities. According to Orvium, the market size last year was $3.2 billion and publishers see profit margins in excess of 36 percent. Just last year more than 9 million active researchers produced data and papers to be published in journals at more than 2.2 million articles per year, leading to 3 billion full-text downloads.

The Orvium platform is still in beta, but it’s slated to launch into full release with all attendant capabilities in the next few months. Part of the company’s objective is to open up scientific publishing to place greater control over research and papers into the hands of the producers of that research and the peer review that makes it valuable.

The beta service is open access, easily searchable for included articles and journals and includes curated lists cultivated by communities.

The company also announced today plans to fund itself with an initial coin offering using its research incentive tokens called ORV. The tokens will be used to underpin the infrastructure of the platform by providing a monetary exchange for publication, distribution, peer review, curation and other activities undertaken by users. Since the tokens will retain a value for utility, they will also be tradable by holders, issuers, banks and fund managers as well as others.

Image: Orvium

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