  Currently, there is no universal method to track who shared what, with whom,
when and for what purposes in a verifiable way to create an individual
incentive for data owners. A platform that allows data owners to control,
delete, and get rewards from sharing their data would be an important enabler
of user data-sharing. We propose a usable blockchain- and smart contracts-based
framework that allows users to store research data locally and share without
losing control and ownership of it. We have created smart contracts for
building automatic verification of the conditions for data access that also
naturally supports building up a verifiable record of the provenance,
incentives for users to share their data and accountability of access. The
paper presents a review of the existing work of research data sharing, the
proposed blockchain-based framework and an evaluation of the framework by
measuring the transaction cost for smart contracts deployment. The results show
that nodes responded quickly in all tested cases with a befitting transaction
cost.
