An environment supporting the production of live research objects

Modern science communication requires innovative environment and means for providing stakeholders with scientific outcomes. Research objects are emerging as replacements of traditional "documents" in scientific communication. These objects are multi-media and multi-part objects that aggregate all the "pieces" that contribute to a research result. Supporting these objects has gone beyond the capacity of traditional technological approaches based on locally specialized data management facilities. In this article we present an environment for producing "live research objects" by exploiting the capabilities offered by a Data Infrastructure. Such environment includes: (i) a workspace where users can organize and share with their co-workers very different items in a file-system-like environment; (ii) an editing framework where users can define the structure of a live research object and compile objects that comply with one of the defined templates; and (iii) a workflow engine where users can define the workflow governing the production of a live research object by specifying the phases and the relative responsible actors(s).