What you cite is what you get? Verifiable addressing of immutable, self-describing research data

Abstract

The requirements of FAIR and Reproducible Science are driving new PID requirements around the citation of exact, verifiable versions of research outputs. For example, versioned DOIs have been implemented on various popular platforms (Figshare, Zenodo, F1000). There is also renewed interest in the idea of data packaging as a practical means of bundling data and metadata in a way that can be easily cited and transmitted as a single payload. Similarly, several groups have identified the need to directly and unambiguously reference the exact content of a data payload in PID metadata: — for example, the Freya project is looking at how best to allow “direct access to content associated with a DOI” (see https://github.com/datacite/freya/issues/2), — RDA is tackling similar issues in the PID Kernel Information Working Group (https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/pid-kernel-information-wg), — and the Software Heritage made ‘verifiability’ a key property of their PID design (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790). This all suggests an appetite within the research community for greater consensus around linking PIDs to versioned (and therefore immutable), self-describing content. Beyond the scholarly communication ecosystem, a number of projects, notably the Interplanetary FileSystem (IPFS) and DAT, use content-addressed, peer-to-peer networks to bake these properties right into the fabric of the network, in a way that has potentially interesting implications for how we share reproducible research outputs. This talk will provide an overview of these issues, explore some of the emerging solutions in the area, as well as the challenges inherent in new approaches.