From Chaos to Clarity: Elevating Zenodo Metadata for Open Science

<p>Zenodo is a generalist repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. Since its launch over 10 years ago, Zenodo has served as an open and dependable home for global science, enabling researchers to share and preserve research outputs of any size, any format, and from any discipline. Zenodo (the service) is built on InvenioRDM (the software). The InvenioRDM framework serves as a modular and nimble foundation for next-generation features that empower preservation, sharing, discoverability, connection, reuse, and credit for a wide range of digital artifacts and data – enabling best practice workflows to equitably drive knowledge forward. Designed to enable open science, it supports deposit of a wide range of research materials, assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to ensure long-term accessibility and citation.  It supports flexible metadata standards and integrates with ORCID, GitHub, and other services to enrich metadata and facilitate seamless sharing. </p> <p>InvenioRDM, the software engine behind Zenodo, provides a scalable, customizable, reliable, and feature-rich infrastructure for Zenodo and dozens of repositories worldwide.  InvenioRDM can constantly evolve through the open source community, ensuring that it stays up to date with research needs and technological advancements. InvenioRDM’s highly flexible metadata model is designed to support diverse disciplines and outputs. Its modular structure allows repositories to customize metadata schemas while maintaining adherence to international standards.  This enables organizations to define discipline-specific fields, controlled vocabularies, and validation rules to capture precise and relevant information about a wide range of outputs, promoting interoperability across systems and repositories.  Machine-readable formats like JSON-LD facilitate metadata harvesting and reuse by external services.  InvenioRDM ensures research outputs are discoverable, citable, and compliant with FAIR principles, enhancing data sharing, discovery, and reuse.  </p> <p>Zenodo and InvenioRDM leverage the Make Data Count (MDC) standard to provide transparent, standardized, and meaningful metrics for research data.  Views, downloads, and citations can be captured, collected, and displayed in a way that meets community standards for data impact assessment.  This enables reliable insights into how research outputs are accessed and reused, promoting greater visibility, accountability, and understanding of the influence and reach of research data.</p> <p>Zenodo collaborates with other members of the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) on shared features like metadata standards and metrics to benefit the research ecosystem. </p>