Today sees the launch of a new online repository, created to allow researchers to share publications and supporting data more easily, thus facilitating open collaboration. The repository is called Zenodo and it has been designed to help researchers based at institutions of all sizes to share results in a wide variety of formats across all fields of science.
The repository has been created through the European Commission’s OpenAIREplus project and is hosted at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. OpenAIREplus was launched at the end of 2011 as a tandem project to OpenAIRE, which is also funded through the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7).
Open access pilot scheme takes off
The European Commission (EC) is currently running a pilot scheme, whereby research funded under FP7 in a number of specific fields is required to be made available in open access repositories. OpenAIRE aims to support the implementation of open access in Europe and link research publications back to information about the mechanisms through which the research was funded. “Now, in OpenAIREplus we’ve added data, too,” says Tim Smith, group leader for collaboration and information services within the CERN IT department. “Not only do we want to know about publications that have come out of EC-funded research, but we now also want to know what datasets have come out of the work and where they are located.” He adds: “Data is currently much worse served than publications… there are very few places out there for researchers to put their datasets.”
The requirement to make publications freely available via open access journals and repositories is set to spread across all fields of research as part of the EC’s next funding program, Horizon 2020, potentially making Zenodo a vital tool for researchers across the continent. “Of course, people also really want to share information with one another; it’s not only a top-down requirement from the European Commission,” says Lars Holm Nielsen, a software engineer based at CERN, who has been working to create the repository. “With Zenodo, we’re really trying to ensure that we cater to the needs of ‘the long tail’. Researchers at large institutions, such as those running around here at CERN using LHC data, are already taken care of, but researchers at smaller institutions don’t necessarily have a place to go to where they can deposit their research and their data.”
Read more: "CERN and OpenAIREplus launch new European research repository" - International Science Grid This Week