Zenodo is an open-access repository that allows researchers to share the results of their work for free. Biologist Dr Donat Agosti manages the Biodiversity Literature Repository on the platform.

A key part of 

biodiversity research is comparing species, which requires having unambiguous and identifiable names. In the past, this meant going to a library and manually copying descriptions of species from books, taking great care not to miss any detail.

“Scientists cite different works, which means that we should not only have a pdf, but we really need access to the data in the publication, in a machine-actionable format.”, Dr Agosti explains.

Over time, it became clear that the descriptions (the taxonomic treatments) underpinning the classifications of different species could be extracted from PDFs and turned into a data type in Zenodo. Additional features were introduced as well, including custom metadata linked to an external vocabulary, the ability to zoom in on figures, and tools for leaving annotations.

Another important feature is the ability to share managing rights, allowing communities to form and involve many different contributors.

"The Biodiversity Literature Repository has almost 2 million records. There are 750,000 figures and 650,000 taxonomic treatments, and when you look at them, they are all used. Zenodo is really one of the only places where you have access to data liberated from publications. This is increasingly important in the world of AI applications, which really depend on curated data."

In the broader open-access movement, Zenodo plays a leading role in making data accessible. Through its use of custom metadata, it opens research outputs to a far wider range of users. “Zenodo is at the forefront of making data accessible, so it demonstrates how this can be happening. Through this custom meta data, it opens data to many more users. In this world of FAIR data, custom metadata play a very important role because they allow also machines not only to read text but also to understand it.”

Supporting science also means fostering innovation, which depends on both basic research and open access to the data behind it. By making data machine-actionable, Zenodo expands who can access and make use of scientific results.

During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, researchers needed to revisit literature on bats and viruses, and making this data accessible facilitated that work. A similar situation has occurred in rare disease research, where understanding how genes interact requires access to information contained in publications.

In the case of biodiversity, Zenodo helps scale up biodiversity monitoring and supports new research approaches by making machine-generated, digital-born data immediately accessible and open for reuse.

Zenodo is already capable of accommodating the needs of modest data sets, but this is just a fraction of the overall need for data services in the scientific field. We need your help to expand Zenodo’s features and storage capabilities.

You can donate to Zenodo through the Make It Matter campaign.