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 contributes to enhancing research reproducibility.
This is the RO-Crate for the article about RO-Crate, submitted to Data Science. The manuscript is included in HTML and PDF versions. Additionally this crate adds the latest RO-Crate specifications and known RO-Crate implementations.
Research Object, Linked Data, Scholarly Communication, Data publishing, Data packaging, FAIR, Metadata, Reproducibility
Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate
Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) website
Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate (HTML)
Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate (PDF)
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Research Object Crates and Machine-actionable Data Management Plans
Convert between machine-actionable data management plans (maDMP) and RO-Crate
Mapping between machine-actionable data management plans (maDMP) and RO-Crate
Object-oriented Python library for reading/writing RO-Crate
Applications and libraries implementing RO-Crate, targeting different types of users across multiple programming languages. creativeWorkStatus is indicative as assessed by this work (Alpha < Beta < Release Candidate (RC) < Release)
A command line application for validating a RO-Crate object against a JSON profile.
Validation according to Workflow RO-Crate profile
Workflow testing and monitoring service; Workflow Testing profile of RO-Crate
Workflow repository; imports and exports Workflow RO-Crate
Platform for publishing data and documents stored in an OCFL repository via a web interface
Workflow execution using RO-Crate as exchange mechanism [@doi:]
Interactive desktop application to create, update and export RO-Crates for different profiles
Web-based application to create RO-Crates using cloud storage
Wraps Galaxy workflow as Workflow RO-Crate
Cultural Heritage portal based on OCFL and RO-Crate
Tools for managing RO-Crates in an OCFL repository
REST API for gradually building ROs for given profile.
Command-line tool to help create RO-Crates and HTML-readable rendering
Library for creating/manipulating crates; basic validation code
Ruby library for reading/writing RO-Crate, with workflow support