Research Object

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In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web. The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared using a single identifier. As such, research objects are an advanced form of Enhanced publication. [1]

Contents

Current implementations build upon existing Web technologies and methods including Linked Data, HTTP, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) and the Open Annotation model, as well as existing approaches for identification and knowledge representation in the scientific domain including Digital Object Identifiers for documents, ORCID identifiers for people, and the Investigation, Study, and Assay (ISA) data model.

Principles and motivation

The research object approach is primarily motivated by a desire to improve reproducibility of scientific investigations. Central to the proposal is need to share research artifacts commonly distributed across specialist repositories on the Web including supporting data, software executables, source code, presentation slides, presentation videos. Research Objects are not one specific technology but are instead guided by a set of principles. Specifically research objects are guided by three principles of identity, aggregation and annotation [2]

A number of communities are developing the research object concept.

ROSC W3C activity

A W3C community group entitled the Research Objects for Scholarly Communication (ROSC) Community Group was started in April 2013. The community charter states that the goals of the ROSC activity are: [3] "to exchange requirements and expectations for supporting a new form of scholarly communication"

The Community Group aims to produce the following types of deliverables:

FAIR digital objects

The FAIR digital object forum is a community that brings together experts from the FAIR data movement, semantic web, and digital publishing of scholarly work. The first conference on FAIR digital objects led the coalition to ratify the Leiden Declaration [4] on FAIR digital objects. The principles contained in the Leiden Declaration provides a prescriptive framework for infrastructure development around digital research objects. This framework draws from the FAIR data principles and ideas around distributed infrastructure that relies on open protocols to prevent vendor lock-in and ensure access that is "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary".

Github and Figshare

The Mozilla Science Lab have initiated an activity in collaboration with GitHub and Figshare to develop "Code as research object". The initial proposal of the activity is to allow users to transfer code from a GitHub repository to figshare, and provide that code with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), providing a permanent record of the code that can be cited in future publications.

Related Research Articles

The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carole Goble</span> British computer scientist

Carole Anne Goble, is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Norman Paton.

The myGrid consortium produces and uses a suite of tools design to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, music, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Stevens (scientist)</span>

Robert David Stevens is a professor of bio-health informatics. and former Head of Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester

Barend Mons is a molecular biologist by training and a leading FAIR data specialist. The first decade of his scientific career he spent on fundamental research on malaria parasites and later on translational research for malaria vaccines. In the year 2000 he switched to advanced data stewardship and (biological) systems analytics. He is currently a professor in Leiden and most known for innovations in scholarly collaboration, especially nanopublications, knowledge graph based discovery and most recently the FAIR data initiative and GO FAIR. Since 2012 he is a Professor in biosemantics in the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in The Netherlands. In 2015 Barend was appointed chair of the High Level Expert Group on the European Open Science Cloud. Since 2017 Barend is heading the International Support and Coordination office of the GO FAIR initiative. He is also the elected president of CODATA, the standing committee on research data related issues of the International Science Council. Barend is a member of the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation(ACTI). He is also the European representative in the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) of the National Academies of Science for engineering and medicine in the USA. Barend is a frequent keynote speaker about FAIR and open science around the world, and participates in various national and international boards.

The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. The OAI-ORE specification implements the ORE Model which introduces the resource map (ReM) that makes it possible to associate an identity with aggregations of resources and make assertions about their structure and semantics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Standard Name Identifier</span> 16 digit identifier for people and organisations

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an identifier system for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, television programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 digits. It can optionally be displayed as divided into four blocks.

myExperiment is a social web site for researchers sharing research objects such as scientific workflows.

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

The BioCatalogue is a curated catalogue of Life Science Web Services. The BioCatalogue was launched in June 2009 at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference. The project is a collaboration between the myGrid project at the University of Manchester led by Carole Goble and the European Bioinformatics Institute led by Rodrigo Lopez. It is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ORCID</span> Code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors

The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output.

Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.

Figshare is an online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data. Figshare is one of a number of portfolio businesses supported by Digital Science, a subsidiary of Springer Nature.

Enhanced publications or enhanced ebooks are a form of electronic publishing for the dissemination and sharing of research outcomes, whose first formal definition can be tracked back to 2009. As many forms of digital publications, they typically feature a unique identifier and descriptive metadata information. Unlike traditional digital publications, enhanced publications are often tailored to serve specific scientific domains and are generally constituted by a set of interconnected parts corresponding to research assets of several kinds and to textual descriptions of the research. The nature and format of such parts and of the relationships between them, depends on the application domain and may largely vary from case to case.

Data publishing is the act of releasing research data in published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.

In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing, and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects, and infrastructure efforts since then.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FAIR data</span> Data compliant with the terms of the FAIR Data Principles

FAIR data are data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The acronym and principles were defined in a March 2016 paper in the journal Scientific Data by a consortium of scientists and organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FORCE11</span> Non-profit organisation to enhance research publishing and communication

FORCE11 is an international coalition of researchers, librarians, publishers and research funders working to reform or enhance the research publishing and communication system. Initiated in 2011 as a community of interest on scholarly communication, FORCE11 is a registered 501(c)(3) organization based in the United States but with members and partners around the world. Key activities include an annual conference, the Scholarly Communications Institute and a range of working groups.

The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics is a list of "ten principles to guide research evaluation", published as a comment in Volume 520, Issue 7548 of Nature, on 22 April 2015. It was formulated by public policy professor Diana Hicks, scientometrics professor Paul Wouters, and their colleagues at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held between 3–5 September 2014 in Leiden, The Netherlands.

References

  1. Belhajjame, Khalid; Zhao, Jun; Garijo, Daniel; Gamble, Matthew; Hettne, Kristina; Palma, Raul; Mina, Eleni; Corcho, Oscar; Gómez-Pérez, José Manuel; Bechhofer, Sean; Klyne, Graham; Goble, Carole (2015). "Using a suite of ontologies for preserving workflow-centric research objects". Journal of Web Semantics . 32: 16–42. doi: 10.1016/j.websem.2015.01.003 . ISSN   1570-8268.
  2. Bechhofer, S.; De Roure, D.; Gamble, M.; Goble, C.; Buchan, I. (2010). "Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge". Nature Precedings . doi: 10.1038/npre.2010.4626.1 .
  3. Zhao, Jun (2013). "Research Object for Scholarly Communication (ROSC) Community Group Charter". www.w3.org.
  4. Zhao, Jun (2022). "Leiden Declaration for FAIR digital objects". https://fairdo.org/ .{{cite web}}: External link in |website= (help)