Research Object Management: Opportunities and Challenges

While electronic papers have played and continue to play a primordial role in the dissemination of research results, researchers now recognize that papers are by no means sufficient to communicate and share research results. As a step in this direction, we present research objects as an abstraction for communicating, sharing and reusing research results. As well as the paper describing the contribution made by the scientist, a research object bundles information about the hypothesis the scientist investigated, the workflow implementing the experiment ran to assess the hypothesis, the data set used, the results obtained, and the conclusions drawn by the scientist, and identify a set of research problems that together aim to enable the management of research objects. We also underline the important role that end-users and automation techniques can play to enable scalable management of research objects.