Orvium, the innovative open access platform for open science

In this post, we want to show you the beginnings of Orvium, understand our motivation, which are our goals and how we will grow up. This project took shape when we were working at CERN. One of the facts that made CERN the world’s top fundamental research laboratory is that its research will be accessible to the whole world, without restriction. So, under this principle, we want to be a digital publishing open access platform to help universities and researchers to make their work accessible to the whole world.

Why is Orvium an open access platform?

One of the biggest challenges scientific research faces today is easy access to the results of studies. That’s the reason why our platform is open access. This way, authors own the copyright license of their papers and they can share it as they want, allowing everybody to access them easily. Besides, it is easier for researchers to obtain recognition and it is more likely to be cited if your work is searchable. Furthermore, an open scientific publishing platform where the share of knowledge is fluid, collaborates to accelerate discovery due to researchers can publish their work without barriers and others can read it in matter of days. It is also important to point out that the European Union is requiring to publish in open access and universities realized that open access is the way to progress. Scientists and research institutions regularly criticize the subscription model surrounding scientific publishing, based on high publication costs, long and opaque processes. Where the lack of transparency prevails, lack of reward for researchers and proliferation of low-quality journals. Such limitation does not only affect to the scientific community but to the whole society too due to the knowledge sharing limitations.

Nevertheless, open access platforms have their inefficiencies too. In one hand, publishing on an open access journal can be expensive, that's why many academic institutions do not have fully open access journals. In the other hand, there are predatory practices that exploit researchers' publishing needs. Predatory journals exploit open access to create a greedy business model by charging publishing fees to authors and then skipping the peer review and editorial process. These predatory journals are a threat to the integrity and reliability for both subscription and open access models hence science in general.

Evolving to a new open access platform

Our platform is live and it helps universities and researchers to surpass these inconveniences that could arise from the open access model. To do so, we have joined with the following programs: CV Labs incubation program and YES!Delft EdTech Validation program to grow up and learn how to understand our customer needs and transform them into new platform features so we can create a solid product. NGI LEDGER and Blockchers programs are EC programs that helped us accelerate our process and engage with our customers. Finally, our collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research “CERN”, which endorses our projects and helps universities and researchers feel confident with our services as CERN’S spin-off and after coursing the mentioned programs and achieve our goals.

Which are our goals?

Orvium is a scientific publishing platform that helps researchers and institutions to share their work, create open access journals and streamline peer review. Our main goal is to help the scientific community to share its publications, remove the limitations of the publication market and enhance the quality of publications. We want to do our bit to enhance science to human heritage, preserving and controlling the dissemination of scientific knowledge so future generations could use such information. Offer a business model that returns benefits to science providing a mechanism to cycle back the profits generated by the scientific community to scientists and funding institutions. Make science more transparent, global and available than ever before by being accessible to everyone each action, task and transaction in the system. Truly recognize researchers’ work and its impact, maximize the scientific collaboration but not only allowing the community to have access to the results of each publication, but to the work itself too. And, finally, incorporate society in the scientific process and evolution, by letting any individual enter into our platform to get informed and participate.

What is our vision? What is next for Orvium?

We want to create a platform for all researchers’ publishing needs, from submitting your research to manage your Open Access peer reviewed journal. The next steps of our path are to finish our service by working together with universities and embody it. So we can polish up the final product we will offer, finalize the development phase and eventually take it to market. And in some months, reach as many universities as possible to foster open science and change the subscription scientific publishing model.

In short, Orvium is an open access publishing platform that seeks transparency, openness and innovation for the current publishing model. It emerges as the new open access platform that really defends the open science principles and proposes solutions to existing issues of open access. With the objective of helping the scientific community to share their knowledge freely and giving the authors the recognition they deserve.

If you want to know more: orvium.io