Five Safes RO-Crate

Metadata provides contextual information about data, such as who created it, when and how it was used, and for what purpose, without exposing the data itself. This information is essential for governance, reproducibility, and transparency. However, metadata practices across Trusted Research Environments are currently inconsistent, reducing the reproducibility and interoperability between Trusted Research Environments.

The Five Safes RO-Crate is a standardised metadata format designed to address this challenge, which describes research outputs in a clear, machine-readable manner. The Five Safes RO-Crate profile, as its name implies, builds further on RO-Crate (Research Object Crate) to meet the needs of TREs, particularly in handling sensitive data.

Within TREvolution, the Five Safes RO-Crate records important details about data generation and use (who, what, when, where, and why) to ensure transparency and reproducibility, particularly when data access is limited. It helps with auditing and validating research processes, building trust in research outcomes across different TREs.

As the metadata framework facilitating data handling across TREs, the Five Safes RO-Crate will be examined by all five DARE UK Early Adopters. As part of this work, the Five Safes RO-Crate team will engage with the Early Adopter projects to inform the development of future iterations of the Five Safes RO-Crate specification. Their feedback will help identify practical requirements, challenges, and opportunities for improving metadata standards in TREs.