Research publications, data, code and more bundled into a shareable, cite-able, reusable format

Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) is a community-maintained method for packaging data with structured, machine-readable metadata, based on existing Web standards (JSON-LD, Schema.org). Research outputs are distributed as a coherent package that embeds the methods used, data produced, outputs generated and their research context. RO-Crate has evolved into a shared, international approach applied across disciplines, organisations, and research infrastructures.

RO-Crate is not an application, but a set of practices for describing research data and its context, formalised through example driven specifications that can be readily implemented by research software. A growing ecosystem of tools and integrations (e.g. libraries & UIs) has enabled global cohesion around a common core metadata model, supporting platform independent exchange and archiving (e.g. Electronic Lab Notebooks).

The strategic impact of RO-Crate lies in its extensibility. Multiple communities have made RO-Crate profiles, specialised independently following shared principles of simplicity (“minimally viable metadata”) and specificity, encoding domain specific descriptions without sacrificing interoperability. Profiles can be formalised as Profile Crates, shared via registries, and used for automated validation.

Building on Linked Data technologies and an incremental approach to FAIR principles (“just enough semantics”), RO-Crate lifts metadata from platform specific systems into a common open format. RO-Crate supports packaging data together with software and computational context and is adopted by workflow systems and research infrastructures for provenance capture and reproducibility.

The eScience Lab is leading the community efforts of the Research Object Crate, in collaboration with University of Queensland.

History

Work on the Research Object concept in the eScience Lab (then myGrid) spurred around 2009 from workflow preservation efforts of myExperiment and Taverna, and continued within the Wf4Ever project that developed the Suite of RO ontologies.

Support for Research Objects was added to Taverna, which formed the basis for CWLProv

The Research Object concept was reborn as RO-Crate, a lightweight representation of research objects, using schema.org and JSON-LD in a fixed JSON-LD serialisation.

See Research Object publications and Research Object background for RO-Crate.

Ove Johan Ragnar Gustafsson, Sean R. Wilkinson, Finn Bacall, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Simone Leo, Luca Pireddu, Stuart Owen, Nick Juty, José Mª Fernández, Tom Brown, Hervé Ménager, Björn Grüning, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Frederik Coppens, Carole Goble (2025):
WorkflowHub: a registry for computational workflows.
Scientific Data 12:837
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04786-3

Simone Leo, Michael R. Crusoe, Laura Rodríguez-Navas, Raül Sirvent, Alexander Kanitz, Paul De Geest, Rudolf Wittner, Luca Pireddu, Daniel Garijo, José M. Fernández, Iacopo Colonnelli, Matej Gallo, Tazro Ohta, Hirotaka Suetake, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Renske de Wit, Bruno de Paula Kinoshita, Stian Soiland-Reyes (2024):
Recording provenance of workflow runs with RO-Crate.
PLOS One 19(9):e0309210
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309210

Stian Soiland-Reyes, Peter Sefton, Mercè Crosas, Leyla Jael Castro, Frederik Coppens, José M. Fernández, Daniel Garijo, Björn Grüning, Marco La Rosa, Simone Leo, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Marc Portier, Ana Trisovic, RO-Crate Community, Paul Groth, Carole Goble (2022):
Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate.
Data Science 5(2)
https://doi.org/10.3233/DS-210053
[RO-Crate]