RO-Crate: package your research outputs with their metadata

RO-Crate is a mechanism for packaging of research outputs along with structured metadata, providing machine-readability and reproducibility following the FAIR principles. RO-Crate is developed through an open community-driven process and reuse existing standards, with a focus on developers and "just enough" Linked Data.

Researchers can distribute their work as an RO-Crate to ensure their data travels with its metadata, so that key components are correctly tracked, archived, and attributed. Data stewards and infrastructure providers can integrate RO-Crate into the projects and platforms they support, to make it easier for researchers to create and consume RO-Crates without knowing the technical background.

The base RO-Crate format is designed to support any domain and any data. Community-developed extensions called "profiles" also allow the creation of more specialised RO-Crates, describing for example workflows, data provenance, or domain-specific data formats.

This poster will outline the RO-Crate project, its basic workings, and some of its most prominent use cases. The aim is to make RSEs at all levels aware of the RO-Crate project, and to start conversations about how it can be integrated into data platforms developed by members of this community.