Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate

TLDR

Researchers increasingly support reproducibility by linking datasets, software, and methods, yet scientific articles are often ambiguous, incomplete, and hard for automated systems to process. The paper introduces RO‑Crate, an open, community‑driven, lightweight framework for packaging research artefacts and metadata in a machine‑readable format. RO‑Crate uses Schema.org annotations in JSON‑LD to create a structured archive of all items contributing to a research outcome, including identifiers, provenance, relations, and annotations, establishing best practices for formal metadata description. RO‑Crate is adopted across bioinformatics, digital humanities, and regulatory sciences, and by applying minimal Linked Data standards it simplifies making research outputs FAIR and enhances reproducibility; an example crate for this article is available at https://w3id.org/ro/doi/10.5281/zenodo.5146227.

Abstract

An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate, an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is based on Schema$.$org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for their use in a wide variety of situations. An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics, digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying "just enough" Linked Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. An RO-Crate for this article is available at https://w3id.org/ro/doi/10.5281/zenodo.5146227