NTO Registry: A Catalogue of Non-Traditional Outputs in the Life Sciences

A versioned, community-extensible catalogue of Non-Traditional Outputs (NTOs) in the Life Sciences — 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. The primary assets in this deposit are three curated YAML data files: data/nto_catalogue.yml — the artefact types, their explanations, the activities that produce them, real Life Science examples, and the infrastructure capable of capturing credit for each. data/infrastructure_catalogue.yml — the normalized registry of credit-capturing platforms (APICURON, ORCID, bio.tools, Zenodo, WorkflowHub and others), each cross-walked onto the CoARA OI4RRA four-tier architecture. data/reform_initiatives.yml — international research assessment reform initiatives (DORA, Leiden Manifesto, Hong Kong Principles, Hidden REF, CoARA, UN Open Source Principles, OPUS RAF) and their relevance to non-traditional outputs. These files are the catalogue itself and are intended for direct reuse, adaptation to other research domains, and machine consumption. Every entry carries added-in-version and last-modified-version provenance, and the catalogue as a whole is versioned under Semantic Versioning so downstream consumers can pin to a known state. Supporting software is archived alongside the data, not in place of it: site/ is the Astro + React website that publishes the catalogue at https://nto-registry.org, and scripts/validate_yaml.py is the schema and reference-integrity validator run against every change. The registry operationalises the landscaping presented in the accompanying preprint, and is maintained in collaboration with the ELIXIR Europe Credit, Recognition & Usage Focus Group.