Smardy: Zero-Trust FAIR Marketplace for Research Data

Over the past five years, different organisations have increasingly called for science to become more open and reproducible. They have endorsed a set of data-management principles known as the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. As such, there is a growing trend towards the open availability of research data, as researchers continue to enhance reproducibility by enabling sharing and opening of their findings and datasets. However, there is not yet a standardised way to openly enable access to datasets while keeping control of their final use, potentially obtaining benefits from their utilisation. This paper introduces Smardy, an EU-funded project which is deploying a traceable FAIR-compliant open innovation marketplace for data. Its innovative method for data exchange consists of the use of blockchain for controlling access rights to data, with data models able to grant access according to policies completely kept under the control of the data owner/producer. We also describe how Smardy employs dimensionality reduction techniques to automatically generate FAIR–compliant metadata, statistical fingerprinting to identify derivated datasets, and watermarking to help data owners trace the distribution of multiple copies of a dataset.