User Acceptance of Usable Blockchain-Based Research Data Sharing System: An Extended TAM-Based Study

Blockchain technology has evolved as a promising means to transform data management models in many domains including healthcare, agricultural research, tourism domains etc. In the research community, a usable blockchain-based system can allow users to create a proof of ownership and provenance of the research work, share research data without losing control and ownership of it, provide incentives for sharing and give users full transparency and control over who access their data, when and for what purpose. The initial adoption of such blockchain-based systems is necessary for continued use of the services, but their user acceptance behavioral model has not been well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we take the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a foundation and extend the external constructs to uncover how the perceived ease of use, perceived usability, quality of the system and perceived enjoyment influence the intention to use the blockchain-based system. We based our study on user evaluation of a prototype of a blockchain-based research data sharing framework using a TAM validated questionnaire. Our results show that, overall, all the individual constructs of the behavior model significantly influence the intention to use the system while their collective effect is found to be insignificant. The quality of the system and the perceived enjoyment have stronger influence on the perceived usefulness. However, the effect of perceived ease of use on the perceived usefulness is not supported. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings.