Evolution and operation of EU Open Research Repository in Zenodo (HORIZON-ZEN+)

The HORIZON-ZEN+ project aims to advance the EU Open Research Repository (EOR Repository) on Zenodo, a key enabler of the European Commission’s Open Science policy. Building on the success of the HORIZON-ZEN project (2023–2025), HORIZON-ZEN+ enhances the repository’s ability to support FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and AI-ready research outputs.

The project addresses two strategic challenges: enabling cost-effective, scalable data curation, and facilitating the discovery and reuse of high-quality datasets across disciplines for AI applications. To this end, the project will integrate AI-assisted curation tools, advanced metadata validation, and automated support workflows; improve deposit and discovery interfaces with support for AI-specific metadata and data packaging standards; and deepen interoperability with the EOSC EU Node and Open Research Europe platform.

By embedding these enhancements directly in Zenodo and its open-source platform InvenioRDM, HORIZON-ZEN+ ensures broad uptake and long-term sustainability, strengthening Europe’s open science infrastructure and supporting researchers in meeting FAIR and AI-readiness mandates.

Objectives

Objective 1: AI-assisted curation and support automation

The project will develop AI-assisted curation and support automation to reduce operational costs and improve the user experience, this includes:

• Self-service handling for standard support requests.
• AI-assisted handling of certain support, curation and submissions tasks.
• Advanced curation checks for submissions.

Objective 2: Enhanced deposit and discovery workflow

THe project will develop an enhanced deposit and discovery workflow supporting FAIR and AI-ready datasets:

• Support for data packaging format for AI-datasets.
• Integration of automated subject classification.
• Support for geospatial metadata.
• Enhanced discovery capabilities.
• Integration of new citation metrics into the Zenodo search engine.

Objective 3: EOSC EU Node and Open Research Europe platform

• Deep the integration between EU Open Research Repository, EOSC EU Node and the Open Research Europe (ORE) platform.
• Build a demonstrator for FAIR and AI-ready datasets/models covering the use case of a researcher depositing in Zenodo, discovering data in Zenodo, and reusing the data in the EOSC EU Node for training an AI-model, and publishing on ORE.

Objective 4: Continued provision of the EU Open Research Repository for research programme beneficiaries

• Run and operate the EU Open Research Repository including providing support, curation, training, user surveys and regular integration of external data sources such as CORDIS.