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Scientific data, its analysis, accuracy, completeness, and reproducibility play a vital role in advancing science and engineering. Open Science Chain (OSC) is a cyberinfrastructure platform built using the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) blockchain technology to address issues related to data reproducibility and accountability in scientific research. OSC preserves the integrity of research datasets and enables different research groups to share datasets with the integrity information. Additionally, it enables quick verification of the exact datasets that were used for a particular published research and tracks its provenance. In this paper, we describe OSC’s command line utility that will preserve the integrity of research datasets from within the researchers’ environment or from remote systems such as HPC resources or campus clusters used for research. The Python-based command line utility can be seamlessly integrated within research workflows and provides an easy way to preserve the integrity of research data in OSC blockchain platform. 

Scientific data, along with its analysis, accuracy, completeness, and reproducibility, plays a vital role in advancing science and engineering. Open Science Chain (OSC) provides a Cyberinfrastructure platform, built using distributed ledger technologies, where verification information about scientific dataset is stored and managed in a consortium blockchain. Researchers have the ability to independently verify the authenticity of scientific results using the information stored with OSC. Researchers can also build research workflows by linking data entries in the ledger and external repositories such as GitHub that will allow for detailed provenance tracking. OSC enables answers to questions such as: how can we ensure research integrity when different research groups share and work on the same datasets across the world? Is it possible to enable quick verification of the exact data sets that were used for particular published research? Can we check the provenance of the data used in the research? In this poster, we highlight our work in building a secure, scalable architecture for OSC including developing a security module for storing identities that can be used by the researchers of science gateways communities to increase the confidence of their scientific results. 

Data sharing is an integral component of research and academic publications, allowing for independent verification of results. Researchers have the ability to extend and build upon prior research when they are able to efficiently access, validate, and verify the data referenced in publications. Despite the well known benefits of making research data more open, data withholding rates have remained constant. Some disincentives to sharing research data include lack of credit, and fear of misrepresentation of data in the absence of context and provenance. While there are several research data sharing repositories that focus on making research data available, there are no cyberinfrastructure platforms that enable researchers to efficiently validate the authenticity of datasets, track the provenance, view the lineage of the data and verify ownership information. In this paper, we introduce and provide an overview of the NSF funded Open Science Chain, a cyberinfrastructure platform built using blockchain technologies that securely stores metadata and verification information about research data and tracks changes to that data in an auditable manner in order to address issues related to reproducibility and accountability in scientific research.