How can I "time-stamp" my data without publishing it?

Question

If I have a DB or set of data, and want to grant access to it to a limited group of experts in a field (not general access), and don't want others using it for their own publications, nor seeing the information being offered for free on the Internet.

What is the best approach to deposit the information somewhere to make sure, in a hypothetical future, that I can claim copyright over it?

Basically, I want to protect myself upfront against My research work stolen and published as his own by the co-author without my consent

Answer 1

Basically, I want to protect myself upfront against My research work stolen and published as his own by the co-author without my consent

What you need is to convince the research community that this is your work, so that if anyone tries to steal it, then it will be considered professional misconduct, they won't be able to publish their theft, etc. I'm not convinced copyright law is the right tool for this. Sure, being able to sue someone for copyright violation could be useful in certain circumstances, but often it won't actually settle the academic issues. For example, collaboration. I might claim to have collaborated with you on the research contained in the database, in which case I would be entitled to be a coauthor on academic publications, and you would be considered to be acting unethically if you denied me coauthorship. There's no way to defend against this using copyright registration, cryptographic time-stamping, etc. You might be able to prove that you already had a copy of the database in the past, but it's much harder to prove that I didn't somehow contribute to it, except in extreme cases such as having had a copy before I first studied this field.

In practice, people often deal with this difficulty by telling more people. If you tell just one person about your work, then they can steal it, and it's your word against theirs. If you tell ten people, then it's much harder for a thief to get away with it, since there are nine other witnesses. If you tell a hundred, then it becomes really difficult to steal your work. Unless someone immediately tries hard to steal it, it will become impossible: the community will react by saying "Wait, Quora Feans told all of us about this database last year. If it was your work, why didn't you say anything back then?"

Whether more publicity is a viable solution depends on your circumstances, but there's a fundamental trade-off here. Ultimately, academia cares about credit for the ideas and research, not just who owns the copyright. (If I write a paper about your work, then I own the copyright to my words, but I don't deserve credit for the ideas.) The more you keep your work secret, the harder it is to prove anything about who deserves the intellectual credit.

Answer 2

See this question on StackOverflow: Is there a way to digitally sign documents to prove they existed at a certain point in time.

The answer is yes. Several solutions were suggested; my answer involves an Internet time-stamping service which signs a cryptographic hash of your document. So if you keep that version of the document, you can prove that it existed on the date in question; but otherwise, nobody ever sees the document except you.

However, if you are actually expecting copyright or IP challenges, I cannot promise that this will stand up legally; you should consult a lawyer.

Answer 3

You can deposit the data in a research data repository that allows to restrict the access to the data while making the metadata available and citable, e.g. with a DOI. This could be your institutional research data repository (if your institution/institute has one and it has these features) or you could use Zenodo run by CERN which is open for everyone to register and deposit data and publications.

Restricted Access: Users may deposit restricted files with the ability to share access with others if certain requirements are met. These files will not be made publicly available and sharing will be made possible only by the approval of depositor of the original file. Source

Answer 4

A good institutional data repository should be able to handle this for you. As an example, The Dataverse Network allows you to deposit data, gives that data a persistent DOI, and then allows you to manage permissions. So you could, for example, deposit the data to make it citable and immediately establish your authorship but then only make it available to specified users (who would need to create Dataverse accounts). In the future, you could make the data more broadly available if you so desired.

Other institutional data repositories should be able to handle this process as well.

Answer 5

Use ProofOfExistence.com to put a hash of your data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Blocks in the blockchain are time-stamped.

By putting a hash of your data on the blockchain, you are not publishing your data or making it in any way publicly available.* In the future, when you release the data, anyone can perform a SHA256 hash of it and verify that it matches the hash in the time-stamped block on the blockchain, thereby proving your priority.

Cf. the ¶ "Demonstrating data ownership without revealing actual data" of ProofOfExistence.com's about page.

^{*ProofOfExistence.com does client-side hashing (using a JavaScript library), so even that website doesn't ever access your data-set itself.}

Answer 6

This is country dependent and more of a legal question, but basically you have to register your work.

Most of the people in academia SE seem to be from USA, so you can check the process for USA. I was not aware of this, but the site is well ranked in Google and seems properly informing.

Your country should provide some similar mechanism. This kind of mechanisms are the best option if you want to be sure. Otherwise, you can use other kind of mechanism as proof of existence or CKAN and then use that as a proof to register the copyright if needed (but you may as well register in the office up front instead of worrying about doing something else and then registering).