Scholarly Communication has evolved significantly in recent years, with an increasing focus on Open Research, data sharing and community-developed open source methods. The concepts of authorship and citation are changing, as researchers are increasingly reusing and evolving common software tools and datasets. Yet with a growing amount of cloud compute power and open platforms available, reproducibility of computational analyses becomes more challenging, and often overlooked in peer review. While recent advances in scientific workflows and provenance capture systems have improved on this situation, a question remains on how to publish, archive and explore digital research outputs, as academic authors and publishers remain focused on PDFs and the occasional CSV file, with the Web and Open Research often left to "best effort" rather than being the expected norm.

To this mean the community initiative Research Object (RO) have been proposed as a way to package and describe research outputs, data, methods, workflows, provenance and structured metadata, reusing existing Web standards and formats.