Designing a Service for Compliant Sharing of Sensitive Research Data

Abstract

Data-driven research is increasingly becoming fueled by access to open datasets, often shared publicly on the Internet. However, many research projects study sensitive data. They cannot easily participate in this shift as access to their data is significantly controlled by ethical and regulatory constraints. This paper discusses the requirements for building a service that enables sensitive data for sharing between collaborators in a controlled manner. We argue that a decentralized service that maintains metadata, a global view on all data usage, and active policy combined with local monitoring and security enforcement can provide automated compliance checking. With such a service, researchers can share sensitive data with a broader community rather than limiting access to core project members.