In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web.
The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared using a single identifier.
[1] Current implementations build upon existing Web technologies and methods including Linked Data, HTTP, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) and the Open Annotation model, as well as existing approaches for identification and knowledge representation in the scientific domain including Digital Object Identifiers for documents, ORCID identifiers for people, and the Investigation, Study, and Assay (ISA) data model.
The principles contained in the Leiden Declaration provides a prescriptive framework for infrastructure development around digital research objects.
The Mozilla Science Lab have initiated an activity in collaboration with GitHub and Figshare to develop "Code as research object".