SMARDY: the CORE of zero-trust FAIR marketplace for research data

Abstract

Supporting discovery through good and open management of existing datasets is the core of progress in data-rich research environments. Open Data and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles drive the exploitation of current results to a better and more trustworthy scientific era, but the wide adoption in Science is hindered by concerns regarding the proper handling of sensitive or extra-valuable copyrighted datasets. We present Smardy, our proposal for extending Open Data Repositories for research datasets with components meant to protect data sovereignty and trust in transfer. Our implementation of a cross-platform is the core of a FAIR Dataset Marketplace, which allows the authors to trade their datasets with the unconditional security of a Zero-Trust environment, and helps them to protect their IP over data using undisputable, Blockchain-based proofs of their authorship. The depicted aspects include application-code design, functional schemes, fingerprinting, and encryption steps for properly handling datasets and generating authorship proofs.