A blockchain-based unified PID with applications in healthcare

This work proposes DOIschain, a decentralized blockchain-based architecture to generate and store persistent, immutable, and perennial identifiers for digital objects (IDO) for the final products of computational scientific research. A supra identifier is proposed to guarantee the global reproducibility, traceability, authenticity, and provenance of the results and artifacts of scientific research. Reproducibility and credibility are achieved through the correct, reliable, and FAIR-compliant identification in blockchain and preservation in the Interplanetary File system (IPFS) of the computational artifacts, such as metadata, the publication paper, the software source code, and datasets. A use case in the health sector is presented within the framework of the BraTS (Brain Tumor Segmentation) competition and a simplified proof-of-concept DOIschains implementation where a persistent generic basic PID for medical datasets is described.