Luce: A blockchain-based data sharing platform for monitoring data license accountability and compliance

Easy access to data is one of the main avenues to accelerate scientific research. As a key element of scientific innovations, data sharing allows the reproduction of results and helps prevent data fabrication, falsification, and misuse. Although the research benefits from data reuse are widely acknowledged, the data collections existing today are still kept in silos. Indeed, monitoring what happens to data once they have been handed to a third party is currently not feasible within the current data sharing practices. We propose a blockchain-based system to trace data collections and potentially create a more trustworthy data sharing process. In this paper, we present the LUCE (License accoUntability and CompliancE) architecture as a decentralized blockchain-based platform supporting data sharing and reuse. LUCE is designed to provide full transparency on what happens to the data after they are shared with third parties. The contributions of this work consist of i) the design of a decentralized data sharing solution with accountability and compliance by design and ii) the inclusion of a dynamic consent model for personalized data sharing preferences and for enabling legal compliance mechanisms. We test the scalability of the platform in a real-time environment where a growing number of users access and reuse different datasets. Compared to existing data sharing solutions, LUCE provides transparency over data sharing practices, enables data reuse, and supports regulatory requirements. The experimentation shows that the platform can be scaled for a large number of users.