Zenodo data repository
This recipe proposes an approach to use Zenodo to publish a dataset (or other resources, such as research software, documents, video, etc). Some suggestions are made to increase the value of the Zenodo publication (by suggesting some conventions from the INSPIRE Technical Guidelines). Zenodo is a generic repository to publish resources related to scientific work and is part of the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. As part of the upload process some metadata is provided and a persistent identifier (DOI) is created. Zenodo resources are clustered in communities. You can join an existing community or start one. Community moderators review and (dis)allow contributions to a community.
The procedure below is also relevant for other scientific repositories, such as Dataverse, Open Science Foundation, Pangaea.de or national academic repositories (France, Netherlands).
Upload your data to Zenodo
After (registering and) logging in you can select the upload resource option.
In the next step a metadata form opens starting with the obvious fields, title, abstract, keywords, publication date. Notice that an existing DOI can be provided or a new one be generated by the platform. DOI’s generated by the platform include a zenodo namespace.
Contact information
The list of contact roles is very detailed in Zenodo. The INSPIRE regulation suggests to have at least 1 contact which has the role of Contact point, including organisation name and and email address.
DataCite metadata schema
Zenodo, like many scientific repositories, adopts the DataCite metadata schema. A common mechanism to capture additional properties, which are not provided by the schema, is to select keywords from selected vocabularies. In Zenodo, the option to add keywords from vocabularies is available in the subject area at the bottom of the metadata form.
Link record to a project
Many resources are created in the scope of a (funded) project. Linking your record to the relevant project, will support the findability of the record. For The horizon europe community for example, the projects are typically identified by their grantnumber. The cordis platform uses this grantnr linkage to select relevant publications from OpenAire (an aggregator of academic works, including from Zenodo). You can find more on this topic in the Soilwise project. For example a presentation on the FAIR strategy on data publication.