Publishing with Zenodo#
Zenodo is an initiative funded by CERN that allows anyone to share their research outputs and mint a DOI for them. Zenodo is funded for at least the next 20 years and so it offers a good long-term solution, as well as being widely used internationally.
How to publish#
Publishing a dataset is easy and quick as long as the data is reasonably organised and has a detailed provenance.
Create a Zenodo account, ORCID can be used to login.
Read and follow the Zenodo policy and terms of use.
Create a Zenodo record for the dataset, uploading the relevant files. CLEX has prepared a step-by-step guide on how to do this, which also covers the kind of information to include.
Useful tips#
A dataset can have several authors, they all should agree to the dataset publication and to list the record on Zenodo. All authors should have made a significant contribution to the data.
Make sure the files:
are following any relevant standards, if they are netcdf files they should follow both CF and ACDD conventions.
have descriptive names and are organised in directories in a way that facilitate their access and use;
Use keywords and controlled vocabularies in the metadata to increase discoverability.
If the data has already been published elsewhere, a record on Zenodo can still be added to improve visibility. In such cases, use the existing DOI, do not create a new DOI for the same data. Instead of uploading the actual data files, a Readme file can be uploaded and links to the original records added for data download.
Only datasets which are less than 50GB can be published. Exceptions are possible, see the relevant information in the Zenodo’s FAQs
It’s easier to zip the files and upload them as one file. An alternative if you have many files is to use the Zenodo API.
A community can be chosen if there is one that is relevant to the record. This will improve discoverability. The community administrators will receive a notification and either approve the record or contact the main author if they need extra information. Remember the data can be listed in more than one community.