Zenodo launched on next generation platform – InvenioRDM

“CERN, OpenAIRE, and the InvenioRDM open source community are excited to announce that Zenodo has moved onto our next generation underlying technical platform, InvenioRDM!

Over the past year, we’ve been working intensely on preparing to move Zenodo on top of a refreshed underlying technical platform, InvenioRDM. Zenodo’s simple user experience and high scalability stay the same, but the underlying engine has been substantially upgraded. In addition InvenioRDM comes with a suite of new features and improvements that have been high on many of our users’ wishlist.

What’s new?

We’ve significantly expanded Zenodo’s collaborative features in many different areas:

Communities: Our community feature has been upgraded with support for multiple curators, members, reviews, curation, and branding, so e.g. multiple curators can now edit records in their community.
Sharing: You can now share records for confidential peer review, enable access requests, or simply create a preview link for your colleagues.
Deposit: Our upload form has received many usability improvements, e.g. being able to select the file which should be previewed by default. In addition we’ve strengthened it through connections to the open science PID infrsatructure, e.g. you can now auto-complete creators from ORCiD and affiliations from ROR, and link to custom funders/awards.
Extras: We’ve also made significant improvements to web accessibility, enabled institutional login via the OpenAIRE AAI, improved usability, and added a download all button for files among other things….”

Zenodo Update: Collaboration Made Easy

“Since its launch in 2013, the catch-all repository has helped millions of researchers by providing the space and technology to easily share their research outputs. This space has been vital to those who do not have access to the infrastructures or tools necessary to share their research work, due to any number of reasons, financial barriers, scarce access to institutional or thematic repositories, limited findability, etc. 

Not only has Zenodo been instrumental in breaking down these barriers, but it has many more practical implications. Thanks to its user-friendliness, it allows for immediate creation of DOI for publications datasets, software, and other research outputs. 

Having one catch-all repository also increases access to knowledge and is greatly advantageous for uncovering links between outputs. The exclusive use of unallied private repositories, hinders discovery, collaboration, and impact as those in the research community don’t have access to each and every one of these sources (and if they did, it would be extremely inefficient to go through and search each one). 

The dire need for a service like Zenodo is evidently apparent when we look at the figures, visits more than doubled between 2021 and 2022 increasing from 12 million to 25 million. Today, Zenodo is expanding upon this community and thereby reasserting this human network as a fundamental pillar of OpenAIRE and its services.

New Mission: From “sharing research made easy” to “collaboration made easy”
For the past 10 years, Zenodo has had one simple goal, to make sharing research easy. Having witnessed millions benefit from the service, we can confidently say this goal was achieved. So as Zenodo enters adulthood, it’s time to redefine its objective to improve upon the service, while of course maintaining its ease of use.

Zenodo’s next mission is making collaboration easy, and in doing so, improve the quality of content being published….”

Zenodo: Celebrating our 10th Anniversary

“Zenodo was launched 10 years ago on May 8th by CERN and OpenAIRE. The goal since day one has been to enable any researcher from anywhere in the world to participate in practising open science. Today, 10 years later, Zenodo supports more than 300,000 researchers in 7500+ research organisations in 153 countries to do just that. A recent study[1] conservatively estimated the socio-economic impact of Zenodo in society to 95 million EUR per year but more likely close to 1 billion EUR/year. All in support of the mission to provide the platform for all researchers to publicly share their work and join the open science movement.

We always believed that research data should end up where researchers can care best for them, whether that be a subject/institute/national repository, but we also knew that gaps in the offerings still left an enormous quantity of research data with nowhere else to go, that we could usefully offer help to.

Zenodo is now a core enabler of open science practice by providing trusted long-term storage of research, especially to those in most need and without the means. CERN is a leader of Big Data storage, creating technologies at the scale frontier, already keeping almost 1 exabyte of high-energy physics data safe. By housing Zenodo in a corner of the CERN Data Centre, we use this expertise to share what we find easy with others that find it hard….”

Zenodo’s Open Repository Streamlines Sharing Science – SPARC

“A decade ago, the scientific community recognized that to move from open access to open science, there was a need for free unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. This meant valuing, sharing and preserving data, software and other digital artifacts from research, but the on-ramp to participate had to be faster and simpler if the practice was going to gain traction.

The European Union decided to fund CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) through the OpenAIRE project to build a catch-all repository to ensure all researchers had a place to easily upload software, data, preprints and other digital outputs.

That was the beginning of Zenodo, which CERN and OpenAIRE launched in 2013. Since, the free global platform has expanded faster than imagined. It now has 25 million visits a year, hosts 3+ million uploads and over 1 petabyte of data. This year marks the platform’s 10th anniversary and today Zenodo is widely viewed as a trusted place to preserve research materials that could be of use to others in advancing science….”

Zenodo’s Open Repository Streamlines Sharing Science – SPARC

“A decade ago, the scientific community recognized that to move from open access to open science, there was a need for free unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. This meant valuing, sharing and preserving data, software and other digital artifacts from research, but the on-ramp to participate had to be faster and simpler if the practice was going to gain traction.

The European Union decided to fund CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) through the OpenAIRE project to build a catch-all repository to ensure all researchers had a place to easily upload software, data, preprints and other digital outputs.

That was the beginning of Zenodo, which CERN and OpenAIRE launched in 2013. Since, the free global platform has expanded faster than imagined. It now has 25 million visits a year, hosts 3+ million uploads and over 1 petabyte of data. This year marks the platform’s 10th anniversary and today Zenodo is widely viewed as a trusted place to preserve research materials that could be of use to others in advancing science….”

CERN publishes comprehensive open science policy | CERN

CERN’s core values include making research open and accessible for everyone. A new policy now brings together existing open science initiatives to ensure a bright future based on transparency and collaboration at CERN.  

Asclepias: Citing Software, Making Science

“The Asclepias Project builds networks of citations between the astronomical academic literature and software, helping you find the tools to push your research forward….

The Asclepias Project is a joint effort of the American Astronomical Society, the NASA Astrophysics Data System, Zenodo, and Sidrat Research, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.”

Hardening our service

“We’ve talked in the past about the challenges of running a service at the scale of Zenodo in the inhospitable environment of the modern internet. Over the past couple of years, we have experienced an exponential increase in our users, content, and traffic… and we couldn’t be happier that Zenodo is proving useful in so many different ways! For Open Science to flourish, researchers should feel empowered to share their data, software, and every part of their journey of publishing their work. We are proud to have done our part in lowering the barrier to share and preserve.

This year we crossed the threshold of 2 million records, we are closing in on storing our first PetaByte of data, and we’ve reached 15 million annual visits. To keep up with these challenging requirements, our team put their heads together with our colleagues here at the CERN Data Center. Their long-running expertise in handling PBs of data generated from the CERN experiments is one of the reasons why we can offer a reliable service to the world in the first place. Over the past year, we have tweaked and optimized our infrastructure to help solve a variety of scaling and performance issues that we’ve faced….”

Code citation was made possible by research software engineers in Germany and the Netherlands | eScience Center

Did you ever have to cite your work when writing an essay for school? Or are you a researcher who can attest to the importance of being cited in research papers? Or perhaps you are a journalist who wants to cite your source to support your story? If you can relate to any of these scenarios, then we can all agree that giving credit where credit is due is important. Well, did you know that up until recently, it was very difficult for software developers to receive credit for their code or for others to cite their work? Thanks to a group of research software engineers in Germany and right here at the Netherlands eScience Center, code citation is now possible! How did they make this happen? For the story behind the scenes, read on.

Designing a useful textbook for an open access audience – Q and A with Filipe Campante, Federico Sturzenegger and Andrés Velasco, authors of Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide? | Impact of Social Sciences

Textbooks play an important role in defining fields of research and summarising key academic ideas for a wider audience. But how do you do this for an open access audience that is potentially unlimited? We talked to Filipe Campante, Federico Sturzenegger and Andrés Velasco¸ authors of the recently published LSE Press book Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide, about how the field has changed in recent times, what makes their approach to macro-economics distinctive, and what rationales and ambitions lie behind producing an open access textbook.

Biodiversity Literature Repository

“The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) has been growing from a community on Zenodo to be a service dedicated to liberate and make open access, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data hidden in the hundreds of millions of pages of scholarly publications.

It is built on top of Zenodo, a digital repository hosted at CERN, which provides a sustainable and robust infrastructure for long tail research data, which can consist of small datasets that otherwise would be lost.

Originally a collaboration between Zenodo, Plazi and Pensoft, BLR began as a repository for taxonomic publications which lacked Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and thus were effectively orphaned from the network of online citations. As it grew its scope expanded to morphed into a highly interlinked repository that focuses on include illustrations and taxonomic treatments contained in publications with all these content types interlinked among themselves and enhanced with and rich metadata.

The source data for BLR are scholarly publications that are most often in PDF or html format but sometimes in XML formats whose structured data facilitates the automated data extraction.

The largest data users are the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the United States’ National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Support of BLR comes from the Arcadia Fund and the three partner institutions Zenodo, Plazi and Pensoft.”

Doing it Right: A Better Approach for Software & Data | Dryad news and views

“The Dryad and Zenodo teams are proud to announce the launch of our first formal integration. As we’ve noted over the last years, we believe that the best way to support the broad scientific community in publishing their outputs is to leverage each other’s strengths and build together. Our plan has always been to find ways to seamlessly connect software publishing and data curation in ways that are both easy enough that the features will be used but also beneficial to the researchers re-using and building on scientific discoveries. This month, we’ve released our first set of features to support exactly that….”

Why figshare? Choosing a new technical infrastructure for 4TU.ResearchData | Open Working

“4TU.ResearchData is an international repository for research data in science, engineering and design. After over 10 years of using Fedora, an open source repository system, to run  4TU.ResearchData, we have made a decision to migrate a significant part of our technical infrastructure to a commercial solution offered by figshare. Why did we decide to do it? Why now, at a time of increasing concerns about relying on proprietary solutions, particularly associated with large publishing houses, to run scholarly communication infrastructures? (see for example, In pursuit of open science, open access is not enough and the SPARC Landscape Analysis)

We anticipate that members of our community, as well as colleagues that use or manage scholarly communications infrastructures might be wondering the same. We are therefore explaining our thinking in this blogpost, hoping it will facilitate more discussion about such developments in the scholarly communications infrastructure….”