NTO Registry: Non-Traditional Outputs in the Life Sciences

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Welcome to the NTO Registry! This repository hosts a community-curated, versioned catalogue of Non-Traditional Outputs (NTOs) — the data curation, research software, training, research support, and peer review work that sustains modern science but is systematically under-represented in publication-centric research assessment.

Our goal is to provide a machine-readable, extensible vocabulary of these artefact types — what they are, the activities that produce them, real examples, and the technical infrastructure capable of capturing credit for them — so that institutions, funders, and tool builders have a concrete, reusable foundation for recognising this work.

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Background and Purpose

This registry operationalises the landscaping presented in Farrell G, Alloza E, Bouhraoua A, Capella-Gutierrez S, Goble C, Hermjakob H, Makaronidou M, Smith A, Sufi S, Vergoulis T, Zoubiri M, Quaglia F, Tosatto SCE, "Credit, recognition, and reward for non-traditional research outputs in the Life Sciences" (2026). That paper maps 24 non-traditional artefact types across 5 categories (Data, Training, Software, Research support, Peer review), illustrated with Life Science examples from ELIXIR Europe, and calls for a community-developed controlled vocabulary and ontology for these assets.

The primary goal of this registry is to serve as a dynamic, community- maintained inventory, explicitly designed for reuse and adaptation. While the initial catalogue is grounded in the Life Sciences, the structure — a categorised artefact taxonomy paired with a normalized catalogue of credit-capturing infrastructure — is intended to be copied and repurposed for other data-intensive research domains.

The catalogue data is maintained in human-readable YAML files within the /data directory:

• data/nto_catalogue.yml — the 24 artefact types, their explanations, corresponding activities, examples, and supporting infrastructure.
• data/infrastructure_catalogue.yml — the normalized registry of platforms (APICURON, ORCID, bio.tools, Zenodo, etc.) referenced by the entries above.
• data/reform_initiatives.yml — key international research assessment reform initiatives (DORA, Leiden Manifesto, Hong Kong Principles, Hidden REF, CoARA) and their relevance to non-traditional research outputs.
• data/CONTRIBUTORS.yml — contributors to the registry's content.

See ARTEFACT_TAXONOMY.md for the full taxonomy and selection criteria.

A public website (site/, built with Astro + React and deployed to GitHub Pages at the custom domain https://nto-registry.org/ via .github/workflows/deploy-site.yml and site/public/CNAME) presents this data as a filterable Registry, an Assessment Reforms table, an Infrastructure directory, a role-based Get Started guide, and an About page — built directly from the YAML above on every push, so the site and the data never drift apart. See Local Development & Preview below to run it locally, and the "Website" section of AGENTS.md for the build/deploy contract.

Note

This registry is under active development and curation. Contributions and suggestions are highly encouraged!

Local Development & Preview

Before opening a PR — or any time you're planning a catalogue update or debugging the site — you can run a full local copy of the registry website to see your changes rendered before they're committed. Both options below support hot reload for anything under site/; editing data/*.yml, however, requires restarting the dev server — build-data.mjs regenerates site/src/generated/*.json once, via the predev npm hook, before the server starts, not on an ongoing watch basis.

Docker (recommended — no local Node install needed)

Also the quickest way to sidestep Node version mismatches, since Astro requires Node 22.12+ and the container always matches regardless of what's installed on your host:

cd site
docker compose up

Opens at http://localhost:4321/ with hot reload. Ctrl+C to stop; after editing data/*.yml, stop and run docker compose up again to pick up the change.

Node directly

cd site
npm install
npm run dev

Requires Node.js 22.12+. Same behaviour as Docker — Ctrl+C and rerun npm run dev after editing data/*.yml.

See site/README.md for the full command reference (build-data, build, preview) and the "Website" section of AGENTS.md for the build/deploy contract.

Versioning

This registry is versioned with strict Semantic Versioning (catalogue-version in data/nto_catalogue.yml). See CONTRIBUTING.md for the exact MAJOR/MINOR/PATCH policy, and CHANGELOG.md for the release history.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to help grow and maintain this registry. We have two straightforward ways to propose an addition:

Option 1: Submit an Issue (Recommended)

1. Navigate to the Issues tab.
2. Choose Submit a New NTO Example/Type to propose a new example, a new artefact type, or a new supporting-infrastructure platform, or Suggest a Change to correct an existing entry.
3. Fill out the form and submit. Maintainers will review and add it.

Option 2: Submit a Pull Request (PR)

1. Edit data/nto_catalogue.yml, data/infrastructure_catalogue.yml, and/or data/reform_initiatives.yml directly, following the in-file template comments and ARTEFACT_TAXONOMY.md. No site changes are needed — the website regenerates from this data on every build.
2. Bump catalogue-version per the SemVer policy and update CHANGELOG.md.
3. Run python3 scripts/validate_yaml.py locally.
4. Open a Pull Request describing your contribution.

Full details are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Agentic contributions

This repository ships agent-facing guidance so AI coding assistants can contribute cohesively: see AGENTS.md for the repository orientation, and .claude/skills/ for two Claude Code skills — add-nto-entry (resolve a submission into the catalogue) and semver-maintenance (bump versions consistently across all dependent files).

License

The content of this registry is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. See LICENSE.md. By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Citation

If you use this registry in your work, please cite it using the CITATION.cff file in the repository root.

Code of Conduct

All participants are expected to adhere to the project's Code of Conduct.

Contact

For questions, suggestions, or to report issues, please open an Issue in this repository, or contact the primary maintainer at gavinmichael.farrell@phd.unipd.it.

Acknowledgements

This repository's governance structure (README style, LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, issue templates, and agent-skill pattern) is adapted from BioComputingUP/OSAI_ecosystem, a sibling registry for Open and Sustainable AI ecosystem components, used under its CC BY 4.0 license. That repository's own structure and documentation approach in turn draw on the Research Software Quality Kit (RSQKit) and ELIXIR's Research Data Management Kit (RDMKit).

The artefact taxonomy captured here is derived from the landscaping work of the ELIXIR Europe community, including contributions via the ELIXIR STEERS and EOSC EVERSE Horizon Europe projects — see data/CONTRIBUTORS.yml for the full list of contributors to that landscaping effort.