Authorship in crates

Last updated on 2025-04-17 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 6 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • How can I list who made the content of the crate?
  • How do I affiliate a person with their place of work?

Objectives

  • Adding and describing a Person contextual entity
  • Adding a Organization contextual entity
  • Understanding what it means to be an authof of the crate
  • Indicating the publisher of the RO-Crate

Authorship

Moving back to the RO-Crate root ./, let’s specify who are the authors of the crate.

Add an author and affiliation

  1. Add yourself as an author of the crate using the type Person
  2. Include your preferred name.
  3. If you don’t have an ORCID, you may use either the URL of your main home page at your institution, or a crate-local identifier like #alice.
  4. Include your affiliation as a string value.

JSON 

{
  "@id": "./",
  "@type": ["Dataset", "LearningResource"],
  "author": {"@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097"},
  "…": "…"
},
{
  "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
  "@type": "Person", 
  "name": "Josiah Carberry",
  "affiliation": "Brown University"
}

Who can be authors of an RO-Crate?

When we say someone is an author of a crate, it means they have contributed something substansively to its content (typically the data). Agreement on what is considered authorship on a dataset can be tricky; you may decide some people would be better represented as contributor. One advantage of RO-Crate is that authorship can be declared explicitly also on each data entity, so it can be clearer where each person have contributed (e.g. a statistician is author of an R script). This means that generally the authors of the crate can be a broader, more inclusive list than perhaps traditionally recognized as academic authorship.

Add an organization

  1. “Unroll” your affiliation of the person as cross-reference to another contextual entity, typed as an Organization.
  2. You can use ROR to find an identifier for most educational/research institutions, or you can use the main web page of your organization as its @id.

JSON 

{
  "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
  "@type": "Person", 
  "name": "Josiah Carberry",
  "affiliation": {
    "@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987"
  }
},
{
  "@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Brown University",
  "url": "http://www.brown.edu/"
}

The reuse of existing identifiers is important for both persons and organization from a FAIR perspective, as their names may not be globally unique.

Specify a publisher

  1. Now imagine you are going to publish the RO-Crate on your institution’s web pages.
  2. Cross-reference the same Organization entity with publisher from the RO-Crate Root entitity:

JSON 

{
   "@id": "./",
   "@type": ["Dataset", "LearningResource"],
   "publisher": {"@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987"},
   "…": "…"
}

Key Points

  • Authors are described as separate entities
  • Organization entities can be shared by multiple persons having the same affiliation
  • Crate authors made (some) of the crate’s content
  • Publishers of an RO-Crate are typically organizations