  An increasing number of researchers support reproducibility by including
pointers to and descriptions of datasets, software and methods in their
publications. However, scientific articles may be ambiguous, incomplete and
difficult to process by automated systems. In this paper we introduce RO-Crate,
an open, community-driven, and lightweight approach to packaging research
artefacts along with their metadata in a machine readable manner. RO-Crate is
based on Schema$.$org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best
practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way for
their use in a wide variety of situations.
  An RO-Crate is a structured archive of all the items that contributed to a
research outcome, including their identifiers, provenance, relations and
annotations. As a general purpose packaging approach for data and their
metadata, RO-Crate is used across multiple areas, including bioinformatics,
digital humanities and regulatory sciences. By applying "just enough" Linked
Data standards, RO-Crate simplifies the process of making research outputs FAIR
while also enhancing research reproducibility.
  An RO-Crate for this article is available at
https://w3id.org/ro/doi/10.5281/zenodo.5146227
