About

The mission of Open Science Chain (OSC) is to

  • enable independent verification of scientific data to foster reuse for advancement of science.

  • foster trust in the research community by protecting the integrity and provenance of scientific data in secure manner.

  • promote training and knowledge exchange for best practices in sharing scientific data.

Data sharing is an integral component of scientific research and associated publications. Researchers have the ability to extend and build upon prior research when they are able to efficiently access, validate, and verify the data referenced. Facilitating the future reuse of data in a secure and independently verifiable manner is critical to the advancement of research.

OSC, built using distributed ledger technologies (consortium blockchain), allows researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their scientific datasets and update this information as the datasets change and evolve over time in an auditable manner. A distributed ledger or consortium blockchain is ideally suited for research and academic environments where organizational collaboration is common and security efficiencies and scalability are preferred over the computational overhead of cryptoeconomics and anonymity.

OSC features a web-based portal with user-friendly interfaces for data registration, search and verification capability along with client tools to access the platform. Additionally researchers can develop "research workflows" linking data entries in the ledger creating an auditable record of the data workflow process behind the research findings.

Featured Publication

Sivagnanam, S., Nandigam, V. and Lin, K., 2019, July. Introducing the Open Science Chain: Protecting Integrity and Provenance of Research Data. In Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning) (p. 18). ACM.

Funding

Open Science Chain is funded by the National Science Foundation (Awards: 18402182114202) and based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego.