Zenodo the most Important Scientific Repository of COVID-19 data

Zenodo is likely the most Important Scientific Repository of COVID-19 data in the world and there is a good chance you have never heard about it.

The name Zenodo is derived from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history.

Passionate about Open Science!

Built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in Open Science.

The OpenAIRE project, in the vanguard of the open access and open data movements in Europe was commissioned by the EC to support their nascent Open Data policy by providing a catch-all repository for EC funded research. CERN, an OpenAIRE partner and pioneer in open source, open access and open data, provided this capability and Zenodo was launched in May 2013.

In support of its research programme CERN has developed tools for Big Data management and extended Digital Library capabilities for Open Data. Through Zenodo these Big Science tools could be effectively shared with the long­-tail of research.

Open Science knows no borders!

The need for a catch-all is not restricted to one funder, or one nation, so the concept caught on, and Zenodo rapidly started welcoming research from all over the world, and from every discipline.

The digital revolution has necessitated a re­tooling of the scholarly processes to handle data and software, but this is proceeding at varying speeds across different communities, disciplines, and nations. To ensure no one is left behind through lack of access to the necessary tools and resources, Zenodo makes the sharing, curation and publication of data and software a reality for all researchers.

Every last detail

To fully understand and reproduce research performed by others, it is necessary to have all the details. In the digital age, that means all the digital artefacts, which are all welcomed in Zenodo.

To be an effective catch­-all, that eliminates barriers to adopting data sharing practices, Zenodo does not impose any requirements on format, size, access restrictions or licence. Quite literally we wish there to be no reason for researchers not to share!

Data, software and other artefacts in support of publications may be the core, but equally welcome are the materials associated with the conferences, projects or the institutions themselves, all of which are necessary to understand the scholarly process.

Don't wait until the publication date!

Publication may happen months or years after completion of the research, so collecting together all the research artefacts at that stage to publish openly is often challenging. Zenodo therefore offers the possibility to house closed and restricted content, so that artefacts can be captured and stored safely whilst the research is ongoing, such that nothing is missing when they are openly shared later in the research workflow.

Additionally, to help publishing, research materials for the review process can be safely uploaded to Zenodo in restricted records and then protected links can be shared with the reviewers. Content can also be embargoed and automatically opened when the associated paper is published.

To support all these use cases, the simple web interface is supplemented by a rich API which allows third ­party tools and services to use Zenodo as a backend in their workflow

Open Science Services

Zenodo helps researchers receive credit by making the research results citable and through OpenAIRE integrates them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies like the European Commission. Citation information is also passed to DataCite and onto the scholarly aggregators.

For future generations

The scholarly communication landscape is undergoing change, there are debates about the ideal services, the ideal business models, the ideal custodians, amidst which Zenodo aims to offer a viable and concrete alternative to commercial services from a memory institution for particle physics, CERN!