CERN, with co-funding from the European Commission, has long invested in Zenodo, a free repository for storing and sharing data, software and other research artefacts. Intended to be used beyond the high-energy physics community, Zenodo taps into CERN’s long-standing tradition and know-how in sharing and preserving scientific knowledge for the benefit of all. It is hosted at CERN and provides the wider scientific community with the option of storing its data in a non-commercial environment and making it freely available to society at large.
With the COVID-19 outbreak necessitating an extraordinary collaborative effort from the scientific community and requiring scientists to act fast in sharing results across disciplines and across borders, Open Science and the tools needed to realise it are more essential and critical than ever.
Consequently, together with OpenAIRE, the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, Zenodo responded to the call by the European Commission for synchronised action and collaboration among the important initiatives in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) in order to facilitate efforts by scientists worldwide working relentlessly to stop the pandemic.
Zenodo and OpenAIRE are today contributing to the call for action with what they do best – preserving and sharing all COVID-19-related datasets, software, preprints, and any other research objects that can help the scientific community to find a breakthrough solution to this universal problem.
Immediate actions were taken in March. The first was the creation of a COVID-19 Research Community on Zenodo, endorsed by the European Commission. The community content, which is automatically fed into the OpenAIRE Open Research Gateway, is currently under development by OpenAIRE and will result in a single point of entry for all research results and other useful resources for the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and SARS-CoV-2. A team of experts nominated by OpenAIRE has also been created to curate the COVID-19 community. Zenodo is also adding a data curator (@StephvandeSandt) to scout for further COVID-19 uploads outside the community and coordinate the COVID-19 curation efforts on Zenodo with those of other teams worldwide. In addition, COVID-19-related support requests are prioritised and Zenodo’s support can further offer, upon request, liberal quota increases (beyond the current limits of 50 GB), one-on-one dedicated support via chat with Zenodo staff, and help with automated uploads to Zenodo of large datasets. Finally, Zenodo’s home page has been revamped to make sure that COVID-19 research objects and communities get the necessary visibility.
Zenodo encourages anybody willing to help improve its COVID-19 content (in any way, for example by displaying relevant information more prominently, curating datasets, or even improving Zenodo features) to get in touch and share their feedback.
Curation team for the Coronavirus Disease Research Community
The curation team is reachable via the following e-mail address for further clarification or information: covid19@openaire.eu.
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For more information on the “CERN against COVID-19” taskforce, visit: https://against-covid-19.web.cern.ch/.