The findability of a wide range of research objects and their related metadata are central to the FAIR principles. This support action combines two successful approaches (FAIR Signposting and RO-Crate) to help ensure that research objects can be packaged up with structured metadata to support reuse and that these packages can be exposed for improved findability. 

FAIR Signposting is a method to expose machine-actionable navigation links that indicate downloadable resources, types and attribution – particularly for scholarly and institutional repositories which use persistent identifiers like DOIs. Signposting makes explicit the links between a typical HTML landing page and the downloadable resources that are available for the research object described by that landing pages, including content resources and machine-readable metadata such as in RDF, although the method is technology-agnostic in terms of metadata formats. It also links to persistent identifiers, both for the research object and its authors. Signposting uses existing standards to achieve this: Web Links (RFC8288) conveyed using a simple HTTP header, HTML <link> elements, and/or Linksets (RFC9264).  All link relations used in Signposting are registered in the IANA Link Relations Registry. Signposting client libraries have been developed for Python and for Ruby, along with a set of benchmark tests for tools to verify parsing and compliance. Repositories currently implementing Signposting include Dataverse and WorkflowHub. Additional information regarding adoption status is available.

RO-Crate has been established as a community effort to practically achieve FAIR packaging of research objects (digital objects like data, methods, software, etc.) with their structured metadata. RO-Crate is based on well-established Web standards and FAIR principles. For its common metadata representations, RO-Crate builds on schema.org, a mature and general mark-up vocabulary used by search engines including Google Dataset Search. RO-Crate libraries are available for Javascript, Python, Ruby and Java, and in addition any RDF tooling supporting JSON-LD can be used (e.g. for knowledge graphs). RO-Crate is being adopted by a range of EU/EOSC projects and can be seen as a pragmatic implementation of the FAIR digital objects vision as highlighted by EOSC’s Interoperability Framework.