dARK: A decentralized blockchain implementation of ARK Persistent Identifiers

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) have become an essential part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem especially for assuring Open Science good practices. Over the years several persistent identifier systems have been adopted with different levels of coverage and sustainability. Most of them are based on centralized models, depending on a few agencies that support the services infrastructure. The ARK identifier, one of the known PIDs, emerged as a viable low-cost solution due to the possibility of implementing in-house providers to the global resolver. Nevertheless, known ARK implementations are mostly centralized, isolated, in-house in single or small groups of institutions. In this work, we present a technology that allows a low-cost and decentralized procedure for assigning ARK persistent identifiers, providing an open/non-centralized permissioned public identifier factory and resolver service. dARK is an ARK implementation built on top of a decentralized network based on institutional blockchain nodes. In this way, the data is owned, stored, and controlled by no single organization but by all the participants of the network. The dARK first minimum viable product implementation shows the feasibility of the concept by assigning and resolving identifiers of scientific production artifacts. This system runs on a community-supported infrastructure without depending on a centralized organization. In particular, decentralization was tested with data from digital library sources, identifying objects that represent scientific articles, demonstrating the feasibility of the concept. The proposed system has a flexible metadata schema, allowing the attribution of PIDs for, potentially, any type of digital/physical object.