Assessing Scientific Contributions in Data Sharing Spaces

In the present academic landscape, the process of collecting data is slow, and the lax infrastructures for data collaborations lead to significant delays in coming up with and disseminating conclusive findings. Therefore, there is an increasing need for a secure, scalable, and trustworthy data-sharing ecosystem that promotes and rewards collaborative data-sharing efforts among researchers, and a robust incentive mechanism is required to achieve this objective. Reputation-based incentives, such as the h-index, have historically played a pivotal role in the academic community. However, the h-index suffers from several limitations. This paper introduces the SCIENCE-index, a blockchain-based metric measuring a researcher's scientific contributions. Utilizing the Microsoft Academic Graph and machine learning techniques, the SCIENCE-index predicts the progress made by a researcher over their career and provides a soft incentive for sharing their datasets with peer researchers. To incentivize researchers to share their data, the SCIENCE-index is augmented to include a data-sharing parameter. DataCite, a database of openly available datasets, proxies this parameter, which is further enhanced by including a researcher's data-sharing activity. Our model is evaluated by comparing the distribution of its output for geographically diverse researchers to that of the h-index. We observe that it results in a much more even spread of evaluations. The SCIENCE-index is a crucial component in constructing a decentralized protocol that promotes trust-based data sharing, addressing the current inequity in dataset sharing. The work outlined in this paper provides the foundation for assessing scientific contributions in future data-sharing spaces powered by decentralized applications.