The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract Open Educational Resources (OER) have become a valuable tool for expanding access to quality education. However, managing intellectual property rights in OER environments remains a challenge, particularly in verifying content authenticity and protecting creators’ rights. To address this challenge, the study proposes a decentralised approach to copyright management for OER. Our solution processes OER textual content using defined windows and the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) algorithm to detect exact and partial similarities efficiently. By integrating blockchain technology and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), we establish a transparent, decentralised platform for storing and managing resources. To assess its effectiveness, the proposed system was implemented and tested on a dataset of 2,600 OER articles. The evaluation demonstrated perfect performance, with 100 per cent precision and recall across both direct and paraphrased plagiarism detection test sets. The results indicate that this technological integration can serve as a robust foundation for enhancing transparency and protecting authors’ rights within the OER ecosystem.