What is the Open Science Chain?

Open Science Chain is an NSF funded project that is building a cyberinfrastructure solution using distributed ledger technologies (consortium blockchain) to enable a broad set of researchers to efficiently verify and validate the authenticity of scientific datasets and share metadata including detailed provenance information in a secure manner.

For more information see the About page.

What are research workflows in OSC?

Registering data with OSC can provide immutable provenance tracking for individual digital object or collection, scientific experiments typically involve a combination of algorithms or computational code, raw data and derived products.

Research workflows in OSC will provide researchers the ability to create a detailed workflow linking multiple digital objects registered in OSC as well as certain external sources (e.g. GitHub) along with additional documentation detailing the experiment (e.g. dependencies, parameters). Research workflows are also saved to the OSC blockchain to enable independent reproducibility of the scientific experiment.