A piece of knowledge, unlike a piece of physical property, can be shared by large groups of people without making anybody poorer. — Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)
At The Omni Project, we’re helping build the next generation of scholarly communications. The academic publishing system is deeply broken — the dissemination of research has become tightly intertwined with the commercial interests of publishers and the growing importance of reputation in academia.
We want to help break this industry deadlock, by disentangling research output from profit and prestige. The best way to achieve this is by giving academics the tools to collectively build an alternative model from the ground-up, which can allow a fundamentally better and more sustainable system to emerge.
Our vision for The Omni Project is to start bringing the world's academics closer together, leveraging the collective intelligence of academic communities, and scaling academic discussion to an unprecedented level. Afterall, this is what the Internet was originally intended for, and only then can academia re-align with its original purpose — to share new knowledge with the world.
We're not creating another repository, portal, journal or publisher. We're helping build a community that cares about good quality research, where academics and scholars can contribute to anything and get rewarded for it. Being a good researcher on the platform means sharing, editing, reviewing and discussing research with others, and as long as you're making quality and consistant contributions, you're recognised as a good academic.
What is Omni? It's an open-source and distributed web application that enables scholars to write, share, discuss and review research papers with academic communities.
This essentially describes a "scholarly commons" where research is made as open and participatory as possible. Omni is a place for academics to freely share their research, and open it up to feedback and improvement from the community, regardless of what stage it's at. Every user is acknowledged for the contributions they make, and every piece of information shared is given a unique ID. This has the potential to drastically improve the flow of information, organisation of knowledge and evolution of ideas.
Omni is also pioneering new incentive and reputation systems for academics and scholars. By rewarding those for contributing value to the research process (rather than focusing solely on research outcomes) we can promote more valid, scientific and organic knowledge creation. Also, the technology that Omni is built on can allow the community to experiment with different currency models, in order to arrive at the most desirable, sustainable solution that works for everyone.
At a glance, Omni offers the following capabilities: