Reproducibility; Research Objects (RO-Crate) and Common Workflow Language (CWL)

The use of digital methods and computational analysis is now ubiquitous across sciences and research disciplines. However, there is a growing concern that while modern computing accelerates scientific development and progress, it can come at the cost of reduced reproducibility and a difficulty of communicating the methodology to other researchers, particularly through traditional scholarly articles as text and static figures. Research Objects have been proposed as a unit of scholarly communication, gathering raw data, software, results, figures and documents, described and inter-related using Linked Data, and as an aggregation cited by its own persistent identifier.

RO-Crate is a realization of Research Objects using off the shelf Web standards (JSON-LD) and vocabularies (schema.org), with a developer-friendly lightweight approach and a set of best-practice guides for capturing “just enough” structured metadata, being interoperable with Linked Data technologies, and extensible for domain-specific needs. RO-Crate is being developed as a community-led project, supported by open source tools, and is being adapted for a wide range of different scientific domains and use cases.