Blockchain Support for a FAIR Research Data Marketplace

Data plays a role of great importance in research, and making it open means freedom to use, reuse, or redistribute it. For research purposes, science has been called to be more open and adhere to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), resulting in a growing trend of open research data. However, there are limitations to openness when working with sensitive data, one being the challenge of dealing with third parties, such as the marketplace intermediating the file transfer. In this work, we propose a blockchain FAIR research data marketplace that protects author rights, and we prove its feasibility and impact in fighting plagiarism. Our innovative approach consists of using the blockchain not only as a source of truth for author rights, access control to data, traceability of the data, and monetization but also for leaving the authors in total control of their data. Using smart contracts, we eliminate the need for a third party to mediate the dataset exchange and give authors autonomy over their data. We mix concepts such as hash, TLSH, and watermarking to provide proof of the data, a level of similarity between different datasets, and a way of identifying the sources of data misuse when shared with multiple individuals.