The EU Open Research Repository (EOR repository), hosted on the CERN-made Zenodo platform, acts as a home for EU project data, and is increasingly popular. Credit: FotoRichter / Pixabay
The EU has funded over 130,000 research projects through its R&D framework programmes over the past 40 years, which has generated enormous quantities of extremely valuable data. There is an increasing understanding that sharing this data in an open way is essential for science to continue to deliver groundbreaking results, but the challenge of doing so efficiently is understandably complex.
This is what makes the EU Open Research Repository (EOR repository), hosted on the CERN-made Zenodo platform, so vital. The repository acts as a simple way for researchers to share their data in a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) manner. Since 2021, making research data as FAIR as possible has become a requirement for all projects funded by the European Commission.
The EOR repository was created through the HORIZON-ZEN project, which ran from 2023 to 2025, to act as a specific space on Zenodo for data, results and materials from EU-funded projects This makes it easier for researchers to both disseminate their data in an organised way, and also to find project results in an efficient way. Now, over 2,700 EU-funded projects have joined the repository, uploading over 150,000 records.
But the repository is a victim of its own success, requiring more human capital to describe and prepare data for upload as it grows, and to keep records findable. To help manage this, the two-year HORIZON-ZEN+ project was launched in October 2025, building on its predecessor with the aim of drawing on artificial intelligence to improve data curation tools, to automate certain workflows, and to improve interfaces for depositing and finding information.
“Researchers carry a wide range of responsibilities, from running studies to writing papers, sharing results, and securing funding. Few have the time or expertise to do all of them well, and their work often suffers as a result, shared poorly or in ways that fall short of FAIR principles,” said Alex Ioannidis, CERN’s Zenodo service manager.
“The role of Zenodo, with its EOR repository, is to provide the easiest way for researchers to preserve their data FAIRly, without burden,” he added.
The new project will introduce several new elements. First, the data curation process puts a high demand on Zenodo’s administrators. Research results directly submitted to EOR, and not to a specific project, require careful curation by the Zenodo team. The new project will build more automated processes to support the team.
Secondly, the project will use AI to improve the discoverability features on the repository. Ensuring that scientific data is uploaded correctly so that it can be rediscovered can be time-consuming, and without a proper framework, researchers can often mis-label work. HORIZON-ZEN+ will use AI to make this process easier for researchers, and also to make the repository’s search functionality smarter.
The EOR repository, and the wider Zenodo platform, are part of the way in which CERN is supporting the EU’s ongoing efforts to improve open science tools.
From autumn this year, the Open Research Europe (ORE) open access publishing platform will be hosted at CERN. ORE is what is known as a diamond access academic journal, meaning it is both free for readers to access peer-reviewed papers published there, and free for researchers to submit papers.
ORE and the EOR repository are complementary. Researchers can use the repository to share all their project results, datasets, posters, etc., and then submit final papers to ORE to be peer-reviewed. These two initiatives also support the EU’s European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which is the broader framework that makes scientific data FAIR across Europe. Essentially, EOSC ensures that more specific repositories, such as the EOR repository, are well linked.