The Zenodo EPFL Community: a pragmatic view of open research data and FAIR practices
- Room: 80/1-001 - Globe of Science and Innovation - 1st Floor
- Speaker:
- Alain Borel, , After a PhD and postdoctoral fellowships in chemistry, I became a scientific librarian in 2005 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). I have collaborated with researchers, librarians and IT specialists to support best practices for open access as well as research data management. I have been involved in the creation of educational resources for researchers, and contributed tools and workflows to facilitate the dissemination and archiving of FAIR data. Providing interoperable IT services to accelerate science is an important point of interest in my career as an information specialist.
This demo presents how EPFL uses the Zenodo EPFL Community as a pragmatic alternative to building a dedicated institutional data repository. Through a streamlined curation policy and lightweight local tools, EPFL enhances dataset visibility, reusability, and compliance with FAIR principles—without imposing extra workload on researchers. The approach integrates datasets with EPFL’s publication infrastructure, ensuring long-term preservation and institutional monitoring. This model offers an efficient, resource-friendly path to support open data practices and foster researcher engagement.
EPFL has been an actor of open research for over two decades, as demonstrated by the Infoscience publication repository, launched in 2004. This collaboration between libraries and IT services has produced a feature-rich platform to support EPFL researchers in their Open Access endeavours, as well as a monitoring tool for EPFL's scholarly publications. However, no consensus was found among the stakeholders regarding the development of an equivalent service for datasets. Meanwhile, Zenodo was identified both by researchers and institutional service providers as a pragmatic solution to cover many urgent use cases. Therefore, an EPFL Community (i.e. collection) was set up in 2014 as a minimal way to monitor data dissemination activities.
As the creation of an EPFL data repository remained an elusive target, the idea arose to leverage the Zenodo EPFL Community to deliver new services. With the addition of a pragmatic curation policy, the Community empowers EPFL researchers to enhance the visibility and reusability of their datasets while promoting openness and the FAIR data principles. Accepted datasets gain benefits without any additional burden for the researchers: metadata records in Infoscience for broader institutional visibility, and long-term preservation in EPFL’s Academic Output Archive (ACOUA) when applicable. This approach has been received favourably by our users.
We leverage various technologies (browser scripting, REST APIs, and others) to streamline processes without excessive development costs. This poster presents the tools we have selected to support the curation process, and discusses the current status and future evolutions of our services.